A new server and storage cluster based at the University of Warwick's Centre for Scientific Computing (CSC) will support the simulation requirements of hundreds of research projects.
It will enable researchers to create finer scale and more realistic simulation models, create more test scenarios and get better, more accurate predictions into areas such as magneto hydro dynamics, computational fluid dynamics and the simulation of air turbulence. The processing power of the new server and storage cluster will reach peak performance of 35.75 TeraFlops and is 3.5 times more powerful than the university’s existing three-year old cluster. It will include 120TB of shared storage, which will enable researchers to store data more easily and securely.
The server and storage cluster already supports researchers from the chemistry, physics, engineering, mathematics, statistics, computer science and systems biology departments.
The server and storage cluster's design, integration and configuration was supplied by data processing, data management and data storage provider, OCF. It is part funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and from research grants and activity in Warwick.
The server and storage cluster is built using IBM hardware including the IBM System x iDataPlex server. The server and storage cluster uses 274 IBM System x iDataPlex dx360 M3 servers each with two Intel Xeon X5650 2.66 GHz 6 Core Processors (a total core count of 3288). There are an additional six IBM iDataPlex servers with 12 Nvidia GPU processors, which will enable the University to test the benefits of using some applications on the processor. The storage solution consists of two IBM System Storage DS3512 Arrays presented to the cluster over Infiniband by two IBM System x3650 M3 Servers using IBM’s General Parallel File System.
