HECToR
HECToR is operated by the HECToR partners, University of Edinburgh HPCx Ltd, the Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG), the University of Edinburgh, and Cray Inc.
The service provides the following:
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Hardware
The Phase 1 HECToR system includes an array of 60 Cray XT4 cabinets delivering 59 teraflops at peak. In the third quarter of 2008, a Cray BlackWidow vector supercomputer of over 2 teraflops peak will be added. The systems will be connected by a common infrastructure (Rainier) which will also support 576 TB of directly attached storage, rising to 934 TB at the end of the phase.
Phase 2b of HECToR is a Cray XE6 system in 20 cabinets, with a total of 44,544 cores, capable of a peak performance of 360 TF. During 2011, a post processor was added for sole use of the NERC communities.
An upgrade to Phase 3 is currently in progress (December 2011). -
Software
HECToR runs the UNICOS/lc operating system, which comprises two components. On the service nodes, which include the user login nodes, there is a full-featured Linux distribution. The compute nodes run a reduced version, Compute Node Linux, which is designed to minimise the demands on the compute time and memory.