Computing Facilities

In 2004 the Department of Physics & Astronomy purchased a high performance compute cluster and a 100TB data storage facility using £750,000 of SRIF2 funding. These systems are provided for scientific research purposes and are used by postgraduate students, postdoctoral researchers and acadmic staff. The linux compute cluster has 256 AMD Opteron processors in 64 nodes plus a head node. The storage facility uses a combination of 30TB of disk drives and a large tape library along with hierarchical storage management software to make use of the different media transparent to the user. More details of this facility are available here.

It is hoped that our exisiting computing cluster will be replaced in late 2008 with a significantly larger machine for the exclusive use of the Theoretical Astrophysics group. It is anticipated that the new machine will provide of order 12 Teraflops with more than a Terabyte of distributed memory, and would be available for use from early 2009. Our group has an ambitious program of numerical simulations which will take full advantage of this new facility. All students will be given access to this state of the art cluster in order to carry out the numerical work associated with their phd projects.