Cardiff gets 20Tflop green super computer

ARCCA is aimed at researchers at the university, and will focus on medical imaging, neuroscience, radiotherapy, computational geoscience, astrophysics, fluid dynamics, molecular simulation and mathematics. Its SRIF-3 supercomputer is the first major system in a UK university to use Intel Quad-core chipsets, with four microprocessors to each chip. The system has approximately four terabytes of memory and has just been measured as performing 20 Teraflops. The results have yet to be officially ratified but would make it the third most powerful cluster in a UK University and 47th in the world supercomputer league table. It was funded with a £2.9 million Science Research Infrastructure Funding (SRIF) grant from the Higher Education Funding Council Wales. ARCCA says it will not only be one of the most powerful at a British University, but also one of the greenest. Based in its own new data centre, it is housed in 10 water-cooled racks fed by three water tanks, saving around £30,000 a year on conventional air-cooling systems.