About the Centre For Innovation
In January 2012 the Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC) awarded £3.8m to the consortium to establish the e-Infrastructure South Centre for Innovation. This funding has enabled the consortium to procure shared High Performance Computing resources for use across the consortium and will support the aim of further engagement with industry and universities within the region as well as advancing the research aims of the consortium partners.
The EPSRC funding has been used to procure two significant (Tier 2) High Performance Computing systems hosted on behalf of the consortium at two technical hubs:
- Emerald, located at the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, is a large GPU system utilising 372 NVIDIA Tesla processors. EMERALD has a sustained capability of 114TF and on installation in March 2012 was one of the largest GPU based systems in Europe. EMERALD is hosted and operated by STFC’s e-Science department in a strategic partnership with the ‘Consortium. For further technical information visit the Emerald 'Getting started' page.
- IRIDIS is hosted and operated by the University of Southampton and is a 12,000 core Intel Westmere based system giving a performance of circa 108TF. IRIDIS will provide the workhorse for capability/highly scaling work which cannot be accommodated on machines currently available at local consortium sites. For further technical information visit the Iridis 'Getting started' page.