To meet our growing and demanding high performance computing requirements, AWE has commissioned and installed a new supercomputer from Cray.
The new machine, Cray XT3 – known as ‘Redwood’ – was officially opened by Professor Sir Roy Anderson, Chief Scientific Advisor to the Ministry of Defence. It is housed in a purpose-built facility, called Larch.
Redwood provides more than 20 times the computing power of our previous supercomputer, Blue Oak. To put this enormous power into perspective, the six billion inhabitants of earth would each have to make nearly 7,000 calculations per second to keep up with Redwood. It has a peak performance of over 40 teraflops (40,000,000,000,000 calculations per second), and weighs 35 tonnes.
This huge leap in computing capability will enable scientists and engineers to continue to underwrite the safety and reliability of the UK’s nuclear warhead stockpile.
Redwood is a massively parallel machine (MPM) based on dual-core AMD Opteron processors. Running at 2.6 GHz, one of these processors is capable of a peak computing performance of 5.2 Gflop/s for each of its two processing elements.
The large numerical models that run on Redwood require an extensive memory – therefore each processing element has at least 4 Gbytes, making a total (distributed over the compute nodules) of more than 32 Tbytes.
AWE and Cray share over 20 years of experience, working together on vector machines since the Cray 1A in 1979.