UK’s most powerful supercomputer starts work at AWE

Named Blackthorn, this supercomputer will work alongside two other large scale bullx supercomputers, named Willow, supplied to AWE earlier this year. The latest addition is even more powerful and is aimed mostly at processing very large single projects, while the Willows continue working on smaller concurrent projects. Blackthorn is one of the first supercomputers in the world to use the latest six-core Xeon Westmere chip from Intel and comprises 2,160 six core processors in 1,080 blades with 750TB of storage. The system can deliver a peak performance of 145 TeraFlops (trillions of calculations per second), and will be used to maintain the warheads for the UK nuclear deterrent Trident, as well as to support AWE position as a centre of excellence for science and technology research. Ken Atkinson, AWE's HPC strategy manager, explains the decision to purchase Blackthorn: "As part of a competitive bid, Bull was able to demonstrate the superior ultra high-performance of the machine. We also took account of Bull's reputation within this market and the fact that other customers had expressed their complete satisfaction with its supercomputers." Atkinson says the supercomputer will be used for large projects that could take several days, or even weeks, to complete. "It was therefore fundamentally important to us that the supercomputer had no single point of failure, so it could survive a problem in, say, one of its disks, without the whole computer breaking down," he recalls. And John Dolphin, computing facilities manager at AWE, adds: "Blackthorn has a power consumption, under load, of 380kW which easily beats the 500kW target the organisation had set Bull. This means that the incoming machine is three to four times more powerful than the supercomputer it is replacing, yet consumes half the electricity."