Cambridge U Deploys UK's Fastest Academic-Based Supercomputer

The University of Cambridge in England has deployed the fastest academic-based supercomputer in the United Kingdom as part of the new Square Kilometer Array (SKA) Open Architecture Lab, a multinational organization that is building the world's largest radio telescope.

The university built the new supercomputer, named Wilkes, in partnership with Dell, NVIDIA, and Mellanox. The system consists of 128 Dell T620 servers and 256 NVIDIA K20 GPUs (graphics processing units) connected by 256 Mellanox Connect IB cards. The system has a computational performance of 240 teraFLOPS (floating-point operations per second) and ranked 166th on the November 2013 Top500 list of supercomputers.

The Wilkes system also has a performance of 3,631 megaFLOPS per watt and ranked second in the November 2013 Green500 list that ranks supercomputers by energy efficiency. According to the university, this extreme energy efficiency is the result of the very high performance per watt provided by the NVIDIA K20 GPUs and the energy efficiency of the Dell T620 servers.

The system uses Mellanox's FDR InfiniBand solution as the interconnect. The dual-rail network was built using Mellanox's Connect-IB adapter cards, which provide throughput of 100 gigabits per second (Gbps) with a message rate of 137 million messages per second. The system also uses NVIDIA RDMA communication acceleration to significantly increase the systems' parallel efficiency.

The Wilkes supercomputer is partly funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) to drive the Square Kilometer Array computing system development in the SKA Open Architecture Lab. According to Gilad Shainer, vice president of marketing at Mellanox, the supercomputer will "enable fundamental advances in many areas of astrophysics and cosmology."

The Cambridge High Performance Computing Service (HPCS) is home to another supercomputer, named Darwin, which ranked 234th on the November 2013 Top500 list of supercomputers.

About the Author

Leila Meyer is a technology writer based in British Columbia. She can be reached at [email protected].

Featured

  • Training the Next Generation of Space Cybersecurity Experts

    CT asked Scott Shackelford, Indiana University professor of law and director of the Ostrom Workshop Program on Cybersecurity and Internet Governance, about the possible emergence of space cybersecurity as a separate field that would support changing practices and foster future space cybersecurity leaders.

  • modern college building with circuit and brain motifs

    Anthropic Launches Claude for Education

    Anthropic has announced a version of its Claude AI assistant tailored for higher education institutions. Claude for Education "gives academic institutions secure, reliable AI access for their entire community," the company said, to enable colleges and universities to develop and implement AI-enabled approaches across teaching, learning, and administration.

  • AI microchip, a cybersecurity shield with a lock, a dollar coin, and a laptop with financial graphs connected by dotted lines

    Survey: Generative AI Surpasses Cybersecurity in 2025 Tech Budgets

    Global IT leaders are placing bigger bets on generative artificial intelligence than cybersecurity in 2025, according to new research by Amazon Web Services (AWS).

  • university building surrounded by icons for AI, checklists, and data governance

    Improving AI Governance for Stronger University Compliance and Innovation

    AI can generate valuable insights for higher education institutions and it can be used to enhance the teaching process itself. The caveat is that this can only be achieved when universities adopt a strategic and proactive set of data and process management policies for their use of AI.