Researchers at the leading London university will use Legion to tackle complex analytical problems, including the most detailed ever simulations of cold dark matter, potentially changing our perception of galaxy formation and gravity. Another department will use supercomputing power to monitor blood flow through the brain of stroke victims to help decide their treatment.
Legion will use cluster technology to create a single machine with a formidable 42.9 TeraFlops per second (TF/s) peak performance, not far off the power of the new National Supercomputing service HECToR with a performance of 60TF/s.
Using industry standards-based technology, rather than high-priced, proprietary systems, researchers have access to previously unavailable levels of computing power, at a remarkably lower cost, said Dell chairman and CEO Michael Dell.
The core system will comprise a Dell high-performance computing cluster with 2,560 processor cores based on Intel dual-core technology, plus an SMP cluster of 96 processor cores and 192TB of storage.
Professor David Price, executive dean of mathematical and physical sciences and chair of the UCL research computing sub-committee, said that using computational power for research is central to the university’s future plans.
It is our goal to create a central HPC resource from which our 16,000 researchers across all disciplines at UCL can benefit, especially in the biomedical science area where we are seeing increasing uptake, he said.
The machine starts production in December, helped by funding from the Science Research Infrastructure Fund. Once complete, Legion will be a beast of 21 metric tonnes, built using 7km of cabling and guzzling 19,000 liters of air per second.
