University of Oxford and a consortium of UK-based academic institutions have deployed NVIDIA’s GPU-accelerated supercomputer to carry out advanced research across a range of scientific and engineering fields.
NVIDIA’s GPU-accelerated supercomputer is an 84-node cluster equipped with 372 NVIDIA Tesla M2090 GPUs, called "Emerald" system which delivers more than 114 teraflops of performance, the company said.
Emerald is designed for computationally intensive research in astrophysics, bioinformatics, chemistry, engineering, genomics, life sciences, nanotechnology, physics and other fields.
Universities and Science Minister David Willetts said the Emerald supercomputer forms part of the UK government’s $224.3m investment in e-infrastructure and will be an invaluable asset to business and universities.
"It will drive growth and innovation, encourage inward investment in the UK and keep us at the very leading edge of science," Willetts said.
Members of the e-Infrastructure South Consortium which commissioned Emerald include the Universities of Bristol and Southampton, and University College London.
NVIDIA has named the University of Oxford as a CUDA Center of Excellence (CCOE) for its ongoing work in parallel computing research and education using NVIDIA GPUs and the NVIDIA CUDA parallel programming environment.
The centre will utilise equipment and grants provided by NVIDIA to support a number of research and academic programme across its mathematics, physical and life sciences divisions.
University of Oxford chief information officer Anne Trefethen said, "With NVIDIA’s support, we can continue to enhance our undergraduate projects and summer bursaries focused on GPU computing, and develop new programs to reach larger numbers of researchers and students."
