News

Cambridge, KIT Deploy HPC Systems for Research

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 02/20/09

Two universities--the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom and Germany's Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)--will be installing high-performance computing systems from SiCortex.

The system at KIT will be used to facilitate research in the fields of meteorology, energy, and life sciences. Of particular interest is a project to identify the numerical simulation of the full human respiratory tract, research that requires highly complex fluid dynamics calculations for which a multi-processor system such as those sold by SiCortex is designed.

"The Steinbuch Center for Computing (SCC), the new information technology center at KIT, is closely involved in research activities related to the emerging multicore and co-processor technologies," said Vincent Heuveline, SCC director. "The SiCortex system offers a very attractive and energy-efficient solution with the high degree of parallelism needed for our research activities."

KIT will be installing its computer with the help of Megware Computer GmbH, which also recently installed a similar system at Germany's University of Magdeburg.

At Cambridge, Streamline Computing will be installing and supporting the HPC system, where it will be used to power computational chemistry research program code development.

"I anticipate utilizing the SiCortex system to complete parallel calculations that explore the energy landscapes of atomic and molecular clusters, biomolecules, and glass formers," said David Wales, the principal researcher who will be interfacing with the SiCortex system in the Department of Chemistry at Cambridge. "We will also use the...system to investigate fundamental reaction mechanisms on metal surfaces, which form the basis of industrial catalytic processes."

SiCortex computers scale from 72 to 5,832 processors running Linux and other open-source code using an architecture that's particularly energy efficient.