The most powerful GPU-accelerated supercomputer in the United Kingdom has been deployed by the University of Oxford and a consortium of leading UK-based academic institutions. Dubbed Emerald and delivering more than 114 teraflops of performance, the 84-node cluster is equipped with 372 Nvidia Tesla M2090 GPUs and has been developed to enable scientists and engineers to accelerate computationally-intensive research in fields such as astrophysics, bioinformatics, chemistry, engineering, genomics, life sciences, nanotechnology and physics.
Emerald has been unveiled at the newly-established Centre for Innovation in High Performance Computing (HPC) at the Science and Technology Facilities Council's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Didcot, England. Providing the infrastructure for the development of scientific and engineering applications, the centre was established by the e-Infrastructure South Consortium, which includes the Universities of Oxford, Bristol, Southampton and University College London. Emerald and other computing systems at the centre have been funded as part of a £3.7 million grant from the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.
