Academic Supercomputing in Europe

United Kingdom

Statistics

Population: 60.3 million
GDP/capita: €24,100

Policy

The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is the managing agent for the UK research councils HPC programme on behalf of the Office of Science and Technology (OST). The High Performance Computing Strategy Committee (HSC) advises the Research Councils and OST on HPC strategy.

There are two national HPC services, which EPSRC has procured on the behalf of all the Research Councils in its role as Managing Agent.

The HPCx service that became operational in December 2002 is provided by a consortium of the University of Edinburgh, Daresbury Laboratory of CCLRC, where the system is located, and IBM. The current system is an IBM pSeries p5-575/1664.
The CSAR (Computer Services for Academic Research) service started in November 1998 and is currently planned to finish in June 2006. It is provided by the Computation for Science (CfS) consortium, comprising of the Computer Sciences Corporation, the University of Manchester, where the system is located, and SGI. The main systems are a SGI Origin 3800/512 and a SGI Altix 3700/512.

Besides the central HPC services provided for all the research councils, individual research councils, universities and research institutes run HPC services for their own research communities.

In November 1998 £26 million was invested for a 6-year period by the UK Research Councils in the Computing Services for Academic Research (CSAR).

In 2002 £53 million was invested for a 6-year period in the HPCx service for the whole UK research community. EPSRC will fund £48 million (£9 million come from the UK e-science programme), NERC £5 million and BBSRC will contribute on a "pay as you go" basis.

On behalf of all the Research Councils EPSRC has started the procurement process of HECTor (High End Computing Terascale Resource), the next generation HPC academic service for 6 years starting in April 2007. The initial service capability sought would be for a peak performance of 50 to 100 Tflop/s (at least a factor of 8 greater than the initial phase of the HPCx service), doubling to 100 to 200 Tflop/s after 2 years, and doubling again to 200 to 400 Tflop/s 2 years after that.

In 2000 the government allocated £120 million to a 'e-Science' programme. Part of this programme is a e-Science core programme with a budget of £35 million that includes grid development. In 2003 OST has allocated new funding for the e-Science programme for the period until 2006 making the total OST investment in e-Science £213M.
The e-Science programme is overseen by a Steering Committee chaired by Professor David Wallace.

Information on the national HPC programme can be found at: http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/hpc/

The UK networking policy is determined by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) - a strategic advisory committee working on behalf of the funding bodies for further and higher education in the UK. The UK Research Councils are represented in JISC. JISC promotes innovative use of information technology and funds among others the network infrastructure. The 2004 budget is €43 million.

JISC intensified in September 2002 the collaboration with her Dutch pendant SURF to create a London - Amsterdam - Chicago optical network between JISC, SURF and Internet2 to enable research into leading edge networks and applications. In May 2003 HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England) allocated £6.5 million in this UKLight initiative. UKLight is part of an international testbed for optical networking.

http://www.jisc.ac.uk

Supercomputing facilities for the academia

The two national HPC services for the Research Councils are provided with the following systems:

CSAR: SGI Altix 3700/512, SGI Origin 3800/512, SGI Origin 2000/128, SGI cluster (32 IA64/677)
HPCx: IBM pSeries p5-575/1664

The other academic systems available are:

Aston University (Birmingham): Cray XD1/144
AWE: IBM SP Power3/1920, Beowulf cluster (152 P4/1800)
Cranfield University: Beowulf cluster (17 P4/3000)
DL: Cray XD1/36, Compaq AlphaServer/64
ECMWF: IBM pSeries 690+/2176, IBM pSeries 690+/2176, IBM pSeries 690/16, Beowulf cluster (64 Opteron/2000)
EPCC: IBM Blue Gene/L (2048 IBM PC440 FP2/700), SunFire 15K/52
HPCF: SunFire 15K/972, Sun cluster (128 Opteron/2200)
Oxford University: Sun Fire 6800 cluster/84, Beowulf cluster (128 PIII/1260), Beowulf cluster (128 Xeon/3060), Beowulf cluster (26 P4/2400)
RAL: Beowulf cluster (256 Opteron/2200), Beowulf cluster (128 Opteron/2200), HP cluster (30), Beowulf cluster (160 Xeon/2670), Beowulf cluster (44 Opteron/2400 + 24 EV68/833), Beowulf cluster (512 PIII/1400), Beowulf cluster (32 Athlon/1200), Beowulf cluster (40 Xeon/3060)
Sanger Institute (Cambridge): IBM cluster (600 Xeon/3200), IBM cluster (376 Xeon/2800), Compaq Alphacluster/72, Beowulf cluster (767 PIII/800)
UKMET: NEC SX-8/128, NEC SX-6/152, NEC SX-6/120, NEC TX7/32
University of Bath: Beowulf cluster (12 P4/2800)
University of Belfast: HP cluster (30 Itanium2/1300 + 42 Itanium2/1400 + 4 Itanium2/1500)
University of Bradford: Beowulf cluster (96 Xeon/2800)
University of Bristol: Beowulf cluster (32 P4/2800), Beowulf cluster (160 PIII/1000), Beowulf cluster (20 Athlon/2300)
University of Cambridge (COSMOS): SGI Altix 3700/152, Beowulf cluster (64 PIII/1000)
University of Cardiff: Beowulf cluster (54 Xeon/3060 + 36 Xeon/2400 + 108 Xeon/2200)
University of Durham: Beowulf cluster (80 P4/2200)
University of Glasgow: IBM cluster (68 Xeon/2400), Dell cluster (22 Xeon/2400), Beowulf cluster (128 PIII/1000)
University of Lancaster: Beowulf cluster (418 Xeon)
University of Leeds: Beowulf cluster (128 Xeon/3060), Beowulf cluster (256 P4/2200-2400), Sun cluster (60 USIIIcu/900)
University of Leicester: Sun cluster (164 Opteron/2400), IBM cluster (96 Power5/1650 + 44 Power5/1900), SGI Origin 3800/64
University of Liverpool: Dell cluster (940 P4/3060), Beowulf cluster (48 Athlon/1700)
University of Luton: Beowulf cluster (68 Xeon/2800)
University of Manchester: IBM SP Power3/144, Beowulf cluster (182 PIII/1170), Beowulf cluster (40 Xeon/3060)
University of Nottingham: Sun cluster (1024 Opteron/2200), Beowulf cluster (128 Xeon/3060)
University of Sheffield: Sun cluster (320 Opteron/2400)
University of Southampton: IBM cluster (600 Opteron/2200 + 214 Xeon/1800), Beowulf cluster/548 (290 PIII/1000, 32 P4/1500, 102 P4/1800, 10 IA64/833)
University of Surrey (Guilford): Beowulf cluster (148 Opteron/2200)
University of Swansea: IBM pSeries p690+/352
University of York: Sun Fire6800/20, Beowulf cluster (40 PIII/1000)

The next figure shows for the last 5 years the peak performance of the #1 UK system and the total performance of UK HPC systems.

Networking in the UK

JANET, the UK's national network, is controlled via the JISC. The network is operated and developed by UKERNA, a company limited by guarantee. UKERNA is owned by its members, namely individuals in the UK higher education and research community and is directed by a Board of Directors appointed by the major funding bodies and the membership. UKERNA is responsible for operational and development aspects of the networking programme.

The core of the JANET backbone operates at 10 Gbps. JANET has a 2x2.5 Gbps connection to GÉANT. JANET connects over 700 organisations including all UK universities, colleges of higher and further education, research council establishments and other organisations that collaborate with this community.

http://www.ja.net

The UKLight optical infrastructure has a hub in London with 10 Gbps connections to Netherlight and Starlight. Access for UK research groups is through the Super-Janet development network which provides a set of 10Gbit/s links.

Acquisition and upgrade plans

DL: The HPCx system will be upgraded to 22 Tflop/s in November 2006.

National GRIDs

The UK e-Science programme has resulted in a large number of (national) grid projects. Only a few of them, with an infrastructural component, are given below.
The Beowulf clusters project has realised four commodity based parallel clusters (two at RAL and two at DL) acting as technology demonstrators and production facilities for e-Science projects.
JISC and CCLRC fund a National Grid Service (NGS) comprising of two data clusters and two compute clusters of significant size. The clusters are located at Manchester, Oxford, CCLRC and the White Rose Grid (Leeds). The National Grid Service entered its initial production phase on April 5th 2004.
A National e-Science Centre has been established in Edinburgh, managed jointly by Glasgow and Edinburgh Universities. Eight other regional centres have been established. The centres will jointly provide a national resource in computing, virtual reality technology, data storage and other key aspects of distributed research.
UK particle physicists and computing scientists collaborate in the GridPP project with the aim to build a grid infrastructure for HEP.
ScotGrid was created in 2001 for particle physics (Atlas and LHC experiments). Now it supports also other disciplines such as bioinformatics and earth sciences. Three university sites (Edinburgh, Glasgow and Durham) provide the grid infrastructure.

http://www.scotgrid.ac.uk

Allocation of resources

Each research council subscribes to the HPC programme according to its needs and awards resources to users through peer-review.

List of abbreviations

AWE UK Atomic Weapons Establishment
BBSRC Biotechnoloy and Biological Sciences Research Council
CfS Computation for Science (consortium of SGI, CSC and Manchester Computing).
CCLRC Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils
CSAR Computer Services for Academic Research
DL Daresbury Laboratory, CCLRC
DTI Department of Trade and Industry
EPCC Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre
EPSRC Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
HPCF Cambridge-Cranfield High Performance Computing Facility
HSC High Performance Computing Strategy Committee
JISC Joint Information Systems Committee
MC Manchester Computing
NERC Natural Environment Research Council
RAL Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, CLRC
UKERNA UK Education and Research Networking Association
UKMET UK Meteorological Office, Bracknell and Exeter

Contacts and Addresses

Hugh Pilcher-Clayton
Head of High-End Computing
EPSRC
Polaris House
North Star Avenue
Swindon
SN2 1ET
email: Hugh.Pilcher-Clayton@epsrc.ac.uk

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