Academic Supercomputing in Europe

Ireland

Statistics

Population: 4.0 million
GDP/capita: €25,900

Policy

The Higher Education Authority (HEA) is the governmental agency established for the funding of the Irish universities. HEA provides ~65% of the funding of the national research network HEAnet which in 2005 has a budget of €13.7 million. The users pay ~20%.
The Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC) has been created in 2005. Its development is organised in three phases building upon existing projects and collaborations:

Phase I (2005) will examine the challenges associated with the management and operations of a National HEC Centre through running existing applications on larger systems bought through this grant and with capital from two PRTLI projects (IITAC and CosmoGrid).
Phase II (2006) will bring the personnel required in to support such a system and develop large scale new science which will be made possible through a national centre.
Finally, the realisation of phase III in 2007/8, Ireland’s centre for HEC will be fully established with devolved management of a large central facility. The computing power of the national system will be of the order 10 Tflop/s representing a twentyfold increase over existing capacity.

http://www.ichec.ie/

Supercomputing facilities for the academia

DIAS: Beowulf cluster (32 Xeon/2400), Beowulf cluster (32 PIII/600)
ICHEC: Bull NS6320 (32 Itanium2/1500), IBM cluster (968 Opteron/2400)
NUI at Galway: SGI Origin 3800/40, Dell cluster (64 Xeon/2400), SGI Altix 3700/20
NUI, Maynooth: IBM cluster (84 PIII/1000)
TCD: IBM cluster (130 Xeon/3060), IBM cluster (24 Opteron/1600), IBM cluster (64 PIII/1000)
UCD (Cosmogrid): Beowulf cluster (220 P4/3200)
University Cork: Dell cluster (100 PIII/1260), Dell cluster (32 PIV/2800)

Acquisition and upgrade plans

TCD: Tflop system planned in 2005.

National academic network

HEAnet - the Irish research network - provides network services to the Irish universities, other HEA organisations, national research organisations and educational institutions.
The HEAnet backbone operates at 1 and 2.5 Gbps. International academic connectivity includes 2.5 Gbps to GÉANT, 1 Gbps to JANET and 622 Mbps to Abilene.

http://web.heanet.ie/

National Grids

GRID-Ireland started in 1999. Grid resources were provided by Trinity College Dublin, University College Cork, NUI Galway and Queens University Belfast.

http://www.grid-ireland.org/

CosmoGrid is a virtual organization for Grid-enabled Computational Physics of Natural Phenomena led by DIAS. The other partners are DCU, NUIG, UCD, HEAnet, Met Eireann, Armagh Observatory and Grid-Ireland.

http://www.cosmogrid.ie

Acquisition and upgrade plans

List of abbreviations

DIAS Dublin Institute for Advanced Studiues
ICHEC Irish Centre for High-End Computing
NUI National University of Ireland
TCD Trinity College Dublin
UCD University College Dublin

Contacts and Addresses

Niall Wilson
Scientific Computing Group,
IT Department
NUI Galway
Co. Galway
Ireland
email: niall.wilson@nuigalway.ie

J.-C. Desplat
Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC)
5 Merrion Square
Dublin 2
Ireland
email: j-c.desplat@ichec.ie

Pick another country