The Mike Barnsley Centre for Climate Research at Swansea University has installed the latest Blue Ice supercomputer from IBM.
The site in Pembrokeshire will use Blue Ice running visualisation software to model how changes in people's lifestyles could affect climate change. Tavi Murray, a professor at the centre, will use the supercomputer to measure past and predict future contributions from glaciers and ice sheets to sea-level rise. Tavi Murray will use this data to predict future repercussions of sea-level rises.
Implemented by OCF, an integrator specialising in high performance computing, the design consists of 80 IBM HS21 Blades running dual quad core processors - totalling 720 cores and eight cell processor blades with Voltaire Infiniband interconnect. It uses a 10 TByte IBM DS4700 storage array, which runs IBM General Parallel File System, a high-performance shared-disk file system. The Mike Barnsley Centre for Climate Research is also running five DCV workstations, and four CUBE displays provide visualisation capabilities to the facility.
Blue Ice Vital Stats:
720 processor cores
80 IBM HS21 Blades
Eight Cell processors
10 Tbyte storage array
Peak performance of 6.8 Teraflops
