The Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC) is the national

high-performance computing High-performance computing (HPC) is the use of supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Overview HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into ...

centre in

Ireland Ireland (, ; ; Ulster Scots dialect, Ulster-Scots: ) is an island in the North Atlantic Ocean, in Northwestern Europe. Geopolitically, the island is divided between the Republic of Ireland (officially Names of the Irish state, named Irelan ...

. It was established in 2005 and provides supercomputing resources, support, training and related services. ICHEC is involved in education and training, including providing courses for researchers.

Kay supercomputer

ICHEC's newest supercomputer, Kay, was commissioned in August 2018 and was named after Irish-American

ENIAC ENIAC (; Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was the first Computer programming, programmable, Electronics, electronic, general-purpose digital computer, completed in 1945. Other computers had some of these features, but ENIAC was ...

programmer

Kathleen Antonelli Kathleen Rita Antonelli ( McNulty; formerly Mauchly; 12 February 1921 – 20 April 2006), known as Kay McNulty, was an Irish computer programmer and one of the six original programmers of the ENIAC, one of the first general-purpose electronic ...

following a public poll, in which the other shortlist candidates were botanist Ellen Hutchins, scientist and inventor Nicholas Callan, geologist

Richard Kirwan Richard Kirwan, LL.D, Fellow of the Royal Society, FRS, FRSE Membership of the Royal Irish Academy, MRIA (1 August 1733 – 22 June 1812) was an Irish geologist and chemist. He was one of the last supporters of the theory of Phlogiston theory, ...

, chemist Eva Philbin, and hydrographer

Francis Beaufort Sir Francis Beaufort ( ; 27 May 1774 – 17 December 1857) was an Irish hydrographer and naval officer who created the Beaufort cipher and the Beaufort scale. Early life Francis Beaufort was descended from French Protestant Hugu ...

. Kay's system is composed of: * A cluster of 336 nodes, each node having 2x 20-core 2.4 GHz Intel Xeon Gold 6148 (

Skylake Skylake or Sky Lake may refer to: * Skylake (microarchitecture) Skylake is Intel's codename for its sixth generation Core microprocessor family that was launched on August 5, 2015, succeeding the Broadwell microarchitecture. Skylake is a mic ...

) processors, 192 GiB of RAM, a 400 GiB local SSD for scratch space and a 100Gbit OmniPath network adaptor. This partition has a total of 13,440 cores and 63 TiB of distributed memory. * A

GPU A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed for digital image processing and to accelerate computer graphics, being present either as a discrete video card or embedded on motherboards, mobile phones, personal ...

partition of 16 nodes with the same specification as above, plus 2x

Nvidia Tesla Nvidia Tesla is the former name for a line of products developed by Nvidia targeted at stream processing or GPGPU, general-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPU), named after pioneering electrical engineer Nikola Tesla. Its products began us ...

V100 16GB PCIe ( Volta architecture) GPUs on each node. Each GPU has 5,120 CUDA cores and 640 Tensor Cores. * A "Phi" partition of 16 nodes, each containing 1x self-hosted Intel

Xeon Phi Xeon Phi is a discontinued series of x86 manycore processors designed and made by Intel. It was intended for use in supercomputers, servers, and high-end workstations. Its architecture allowed use of standard programming languages and applicati ...

Processor 7210 ( Knights Landing or KNL architecture) with 64 cores @ 1.3 GHz, 192 GiB RAM and a 400 GiB local SSD for scratch space. * A "high memory" set of 6 nodes each containing 1.5 TiB of RAM, 2x 20-core 2.4 GHz Intel Xeon Gold 6148 (Skylake) processors and 1 TiB of dedicated local SSD for scratch storage. * A set of service and administrative nodes to provide user login, batch scheduling, management, networking, etc. Storage is provided via Lustre filesystems on a high-performance DDN SFA14k system with 1 PiB of capacity. Like all previous HPC systems, ICHEC is connected to the HEAnet and

GÉANT GÉANT (''Gigabit European Academic Network'') is the pan-European data network for the research and education community. It interconnects national research and education networks (NRENs) across Europe, enabling collaboration on projects rangin ...

networks.

Fionn supercomputer

Between 2014 and August 2018, ICHEC managed the Fionn supercomputer, a heterogeneous system composed of: * an SGI ICE X cluster with 320 nodes or 7,680

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

Ivy Bridge processor cores with a combined 20 TB of memory (24 cores and 64 GB memory per node). * a hybrid partition with 32 nodes. Each node has 20

Ivy Bridge processor cores, 64 GB of memory along with many-core hardware from

(2x

5110P coprocessors on 16 nodes) and

Nvidia Nvidia Corporation ( ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and incorporated in Delaware. Founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang (president and CEO), Chris Malachowsky, and Curti ...

(2x Tesla K20X

GPGPU General-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU, or less often GPGP) is the use of a graphics processing unit (GPU), which typically handles computation only for computer graphics, to perform computation in applications traditiona ...

cards on 16 nodes). * a shared memory compute node (14 internal

NUMA Numa or NUMA may refer to: * Non-uniform memory access (NUMA), in computing Places * Numa Falls, a waterfall in Kootenay National Park, Canada * 15854 Numa, a main-belt asteroid United States * Numa, Indiana * Numa, Iowa * Numa, Oklahoma * ...

nodes) with 112

Sandy Bridge Sandy Bridge is the List of Intel codenames, codename for Intel's 32 nm process, 32 nm microarchitecture used in the second generation of the Intel Core, Intel Core processors (Intel Core i7, Core i7, Intel Core i5, i5, Intel Core i3, i3). The Sa ...

processor cores, 2

5110P coprocessors and 1.7 TB of memory. * a set of service and administrative nodes to provide user login, batch scheduling, management, tape backup, switches, etc. Storage is provided via
DDN
SFA12k-20 platform with 560 TB of capacity to all components of the machine via a Lustre filesystem. Fionn was connected to HEAnet's networking infrastructure. Irish researchers were able to apply for access to Fionn via several schemes. A helpdesk was available for user support. Fionn was replaced by Kay in August 2018.Fionn
/ref>

Other ICHEC functions

ICHEC was designated a

CUDA In computing, CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) is a proprietary parallel computing platform and application programming interface (API) that allows software to use certain types of graphics processing units (GPUs) for accelerated gene ...

Research Center in 2010List of Nvidia CUDA Research Centers, retrieved 19 September 2014
/ref> Its work in this area has included the porting to CUDA of the

Quantum ESPRESSO Quantum ESPRESSO (Quantum Open-Source Package for Research in Electronic Structure, Simulation, and Optimization; QE) is a suite for first-principles electronic-structure calculations and materials modeling, distributed for free and as free sof ...

and DL_POLY

molecular dynamics Molecular dynamics (MD) is a computer simulation method for analyzing the Motion (physics), physical movements of atoms and molecules. The atoms and molecules are allowed to interact for a fixed period of time, giving a view of the dynamics ( ...

packages as well as various industrial benchmarking studies. ICHEC became an

Parallel Computing Center (IPCC) in 2014List of Intel Parallel Computing Centers, retrieved 19 September 2014
/ref> to conduct research on many-core technology in high performance computing and big data analytics. In collaboration with

Met Éireann Met Éireann (; meaning "Meteorology, Met of Ireland") is the state meteorology, meteorological service of Republic of Ireland, Ireland, part of the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage. History The history of modern meteorolog ...

, ICHEC provides hardware and support to publish climate and weather forecast models. ICHEC computational scientists also take an active part in the ongoing development of the models and conduct related climate/environmental research. ICHEC works with a number of

Irish government The Government of Ireland () is the executive authority of Ireland, headed by the , the head of government. The government – also known as the cabinet – is composed of ministers, each of whom must be a member of the , which consists of ...

departments and agencies (e.g.

Enterprise Ireland Enterprise Ireland is an Irish state economic development agency focused on helping Irish-owned business deliver new export sales. The aim of Enterprise Ireland is to help Irish enterprises to "start, grow, innovate and win export sales in glo ...

IDA Ireland IDA Ireland () is the agency responsible for the attraction and retention of inward foreign direct investment (FDI) into Ireland. The agency was founded in 1949 as the Industrial Development Authority and placed on a statutory footing a year late ...

) to provide consultancy services to Irish companies in various areas including

data mining Data mining is the process of extracting and finding patterns in massive data sets involving methods at the intersection of machine learning, statistics, and database systems. Data mining is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and ...

, visualisation,

data management Data management comprises all disciplines related to handling data as a valuable resource, it is the practice of managing an organization's data so it can be analyzed for decision making. Concept The concept of data management emerged alongsi ...

and software

development Development or developing may refer to: Arts *Development (music), the process by which thematic material is reshaped * Photographic development *Filmmaking, development phase, including finance and budgeting * Development hell, when a proje ...

optimization Mathematical optimization (alternatively spelled ''optimisation'') or mathematical programming is the selection of a best element, with regard to some criteria, from some set of available alternatives. It is generally divided into two subfiel ...

References

External links

ICHEC web site
{{authority control Supercomputer sites Computational science Research institutes in the Republic of Ireland