News

Supercomputer celebrates 1st birthday and crunches over 3 million hours of data

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 11:49:00 GMT

The University of Portsmouth’s supercomputer (SCIAMA) has processed over 180,000 jobs in the last year, keeping the central processing unit (CPU) busy for over three million hours in total.

Installed in January 2011 the SEPNET Computing Infrastructure for Astrophysical Modelling and Analysis (SCIAMA) supercomputer is at the heart of astrophysical modelling at the University’s Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation (ICG).  It is used by the institute’s members, members of the University from other departments and Universities across the south east of England.  It has an online presence and the SCIAMA’s capabilities and activities can be viewed by visiting http://www.sciama.icg.port.ac.uk.

In its first year of operation SCIAMA has logged 3,411,933 CPU hours and completed 184,580 jobs.  74 Users have provided SCIAMA with its work (27 ICG researchers, 16 from other University departments, 12 from other University’s in the South-East and 14 other users from around the world).

The system has 960 computer cores so the total available CPU hours within a year  is 8.3 Million of which SCIAMA used 3.4 million (approximately 41%)

 Supercomputers such as SCIAMA help researchers model the Universe, allowing complex computational models to be evaluated in a few months, where a normal computer would take several hundred years and the galaxy itself would require several billion years.

A visual example of the work that supercomputers (such as SCIAMA) make possible is available in a video series on the ICG website called “From Earth to the Edge of the Universe” (http://research.icg.port.ac.uk/outreach).

If you would like to learn more about the ICG and their work, visit their web pages at http://research.icg.port.ac.uk/