HECToR

HECToR (High End Computing Terascale Resources) is a British academic national supercomputer service funded by EPSRC, NERC and BBSRC for the UK academic community. The HECToR service is run by partners including EPCC, STFC and Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG)., James Randerson, Guardian, Wed 2 Jan 2008

The supercomputer itself (currently a Cray XE6) is located at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. The first phase came online in October 2007, and is at 'phase 2b' with a peak performance of over 360 teraflops. A third phase is planned for 2011.

Hardware

HECToR's hardware configuration has been progressively upgraded since the system was first commissioned.

Phase 1

HECToR's initial configuration, known as Phase 1, featured 60 Cray XT4 cabinets containing 1416 compute blades, giving a total of 11,328 2.8 GHz AMD Opteron processor cores, connected to 576 terabytes of RAID backing storage, later increased to 934 TB. The peak performance of the system was 59 teraflops.

In August 2008, 28 Cray X2 Black Widow vector compute nodes were addded to the system. Each node had 4 vector processors, giving a total of 112 processors. Each processor was capable of 25.6 gigaflops, giving a peak performance of 2.87 teraflops. Each 4-processor node shared 32 gigabytes of memory.

Phase 2a

In the summer of 2009, the XT4 cabinets were upgraded with quad-core...
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