HECToR (High End Computing Terascale Resources) is a UK academic national supercomputer service procured by EPSRC on behalf of the UK academic community. The HECToR service is run by a consortium including EPCC, STFC and Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG).[1]
The supercomputer itself (a Cray XT4) is located at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. The first phase came online in October, 2007, and the current phase has a peak performance of around 208 teraFLOPS. The next phase is planned for early 2010 and the third phase is planned for 2011.
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Hardware
HECToR features 60 Cray XT4 cabinets connected to 934 terabytes of backing storage. HECToR also includes 28 Cray X2 nodes.
- XT Component
Each of the 5664 compute nodes consists of a 2.3GHz AMD Opteron processor with 8 GB memory. This gives a total of 22,656 processing cores and a total system memory of 45.3 terabytes. Each quad-core socket controls a Cray SeaStar2 chip router directly through its HyperTransport link. This has 6 links which are used to implement a 3D-torus of processors.
- X2 Component
Each of the 28 vector compute nodes has 4 Cray X2 vector processors, giving a total of 112 processors. Each processor is capable of 25.6 gigaFLOPS, giving a peak performance of 2.87 teraFLOPS. Each 4-processor node shares 32 gigabytes of memory.
Software
HECToR's operating system is UNICOS/lc. A variety of applications, compilers and utilities are available to users.
- Compilers
HECToR supports four compiler suites:
- PGI compilers (v7.1-4) - pgf90, pgf77, pgcc, pgCC.
- Pathscale compilers (v3.1) - pathf90, pathcc, pathCC.
- GNU compilers (v4.2.3) - gfortran, gcc.
- Cray compilers.
Compilation for the HECToR backend nodes is facilitated through the Cray compilation scripts: ftn, cc, and CC.
References
- ^ Inside the UK's fastest machine, James Randerson, Guardian, Wed 2 Jan 2008
External links
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