Reading upgrades to UK’s most powerful academic supercomputer

The University of Reading’s Advanced Computing and Emerging Technologies (ACET) Centre has upgraded its blade-based computer system, overtaking Cambridge University to have the most powerful academic supercomputer in the UK.

The computer is now the second most powerful computer in the UK overall - the UK’s most powerful is at the Atomic Weapons Establishment in Aldermaston - and 36th in the world.

Reading uses the computer for research into air pollution, climate change, financial modelling, drug discovery, computational biology and meteorology. The upgrade will allow researchers to make more accurate predictions in each of these areas.

Its IBM BladeCenter has been upgraded with 700 JS21 blades, equipped with 3,040 IBM PowerPC 970 processor cores, each running at a 2.3GHz clock speed.

This gives a theoretical peak performance of 27.97 teraflops (trillions of calculations per second). Connected via via a Myrinet Interconnect, the system can achieve a measured performance (Rmax) of 19.04 teraflops using the Linpack benchmark - an industry standard.

Research carried out at Reading has a host of practical applications - deciding on the best place to build flood defences, for example, or speeding up the development of drugs.

The world’s most powerful supercomputer is the IBM Blue Gene/L system developed for the US Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration. This machine has a performance of 280.6 teraflops per second using the Linpack benchmark.