News
UCD's Usage of Stokes High Performance Compute Cluster
The UCD Research Community can avail of 10% of the Stokes High Performance Compute cluster (listed as number 117th on the November 2008 top 500 list of fastest supercomputers worldwide www.top500.org ) enabling researchers to join a dedicated UCD queue on the national cluster consisting of 280 compute cores. User support for this service is offered via a combination of UCD Research IT and ICHEC staff. On-site training was provided by ICHEC staff earlier this year with more courses to be scheduled in early 2010.
Since its launch in January 2009 usage of the service continues to grow with Dr Niall English (UCD School of Chemical & Bioprocess Engineering) topping our list for central processing unit (cpu) hours consumed to date in 2009.
There are benefits to sharing a large cluster such as this for example sample usage figures for July 2009 show the UCD queue consumed 343,090 cpu hours although our allocation is 208,320 cpu hours. This overuse of cpu hours was facilitated by using unused ICHEC cycles during the summer period showing efficiencies can be gained by pooling resources.
Dr Niall English, School of Chemical and Bioprocess Engineering
beside the Stokes HPC Cluster in the Research IT Data Centre