17th Jul 2014

Second Irish Supercomputer List released, number of machines up 50+%

The second Irish Supercomputer List, ranking the fastest high performance computers in Ireland was released on June 30, increasing the number of ranked computers by over 50%.

The project, headed by staff at CCT and other renowned third-level institutions, was launched in November 2013 to raise the profile of High Performance Computing (HPC) in Ireland and abroad. The list, at www.IrishSupercomputerList.org, is updated twice annually in November and June and there is a continuously open call for participation from users and maintainers of Irish HPC installations.

Ireland has grown over the last two decades into a high-end centre of excellence in the IT sector with many major multinational IT companies having a strong presence. Despite this, there has not previously been any record of the performance and types of HPC installations which are based on the island of Ireland. The list is similar in motivation to www.top500.org, which has been tracking the fastest supercomputers globally for over 20 years.

The combined number of CPU cores in the computers on the list is over 69,000. The list also shows that Ireland is following a global trend of using more GPUs and other types of accelerators for HPC. The total number of accelerator cores on the list is over 100,000.

The Irish Supercomputer List is maintained by an independent group of computer science researchers representing industry and academia, including Dublin City University and the College of Computer Training, also in Dublin. Providing an international perspective, are representatives from the University of Oxford and the University of Helsinki. The advisory committee is made of members from Ireland and the UK.

Speaking of the launch of the June 2014 Irish Supercomputing List, Dr. Brett Becker, of CCT said:

“It is very encouraging that the Irish Supercomputer List has grown so much in its first six months. The main aims of the project are to put Ireland on the global HPC map, and to put the Irish HPC landscape in perspective. We are well on the way towards achieving those aims. Ireland continues to punch far above its weight when compared to many other countries with much larger populations. Now we can say that Ireland is punching even harder.”

Some facts from the June 2014 Irish Supercomputer List:

  • Total CPU cores: almost 70,000
  • Total Accelerator cores: over 100,000
  • Total RAM (15 reporting): 73TB
  • Total Storage (10 reporting): 1172TB
  • Most machines (6/23): Trinity College Dublin
  • Most popular chip: Intel (20/23)
  • Number of machines per sector: Academia(12), Industry(7), Other(4)
  • Total performance: 676TFlop
  • Average performance: 30TFlop

More from the Irish Supercomputer List here, and from InsideHPC here.