HPC clusters

PML has a new High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster, allowing PML scientists to faster develop solutions to tackle the largest challenges in marine science.

A cluster gives scientists at PML the ability to find answers to questions which, without access to this facility, could take weeks, months or even years to calculate; expanding the horizons of our knowledge about ecosystem functions across the world's oceans.

Through having a cluster facility in-house, PML scientists, specifically those in PML’s world-leading modelling group have the increased capacity to more fully understand the marine environment and the future challenges it faces. These challenges could be changes in the marine ecosystem from climate change, potential impacts from marine renewable energy devices or understanding how carbon sequestration and storage (CCS) impacts might spread from a leak source.

The new HPC, supplied by Atos, comprises of 36 nodes, each of which is more powerful than four top-of-the-range desktop computers. These individual nodes are connected to each other over a super-fast InfiniBand network and the whole cluster has access to a parallel storage solution providing 45TiB of highly available fast-access disk space. The cluster includes two high memory nodes, each with 256GB of RAM, intended for post-processing model outputs. In total, the cluster has 720 cores and 4.8TB of RAM available to it, producing up to 24 teraFLOPS of computing performance.

The results of the models which run on the new HPC will feed into a number of ongoing projects at PML in collaboration with scientists in the UK, Europe and worldwide. Those results will make their way to national and international databases and help inform us on the future of our oceans.