Climate modelling, new insights into the structure of space and time, and the design of novel drugs are but a few of the many research areas that will be transformed by the installation of the clusters at the university.

Dr David Newbold, physicist, explained how the new HPC cluster will allow the university's physicists to be amongst the first to examine results from the Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest particle collider which is set to provide new insights into the structure of space and time and the origin of mass.

Prof. Paul Valdes, climatologist, said: "This is an incredibly exciting development. These HPCs will allow us to develop a new generation of numerical models that have a much more sophisticated representation of the climate system. This will give everyone much greater confidence in the regional predictions of future climate change."

Prof. Steve Wiggins, Head of Mathematics and a co-instigator of the project, stated that "HPC has ascended to a new level of importance. Any university that aspires to be world-class must have this basic research infrastructure. In future, HPC will be an indispensable tool in every good researchers" toolbox. The University of Bristol is leading the way.

ClusterVision will supply, deliver and install the hardware, and support the three clusters which will run the ClusterVisionOS™ Linux based cluster operating system and software environment. The computational power will be delivered by 636 IBM System x servers each equipped with two of the latest dual-core AMD Opteron™ processors. A number of servers will be equipped with ClearSpeed Advance™ accelerator boards to boost the floating point performance of the system. IBM's General Parallel File System (GPFS) will provide a high performance scalable environment to support a minimum of 100TB disk storage. The 2544 AMD Opteron processing cores have a peak performance of more than 13 trillion calculations per second -- a capability equivalent to the entire population of the world using hand held calculators and working simultaneously for about three hours.

ClearSpeed Advance boards can each perform double precision floating point matrix multiplication calculations at 50 GigaFlops while consuming a mere 25 Watts of energy. This extends the system's ability to achieve the university's most intense peak performance needs while optimising for cost, energy usage and the physical infrastructure constraints set by the environmental considerations of building the new HPC machine room on the Bristol University campus.

"The solution put forward by ClusterVision, IBM and ClearSpeed was the best overall offering in line with the university's research and development requirements", said Dr Ian Stewart, Numerical Analyst, who co-ordinated the procurement at Bristol. "In addition to firmly establishing the university as one of the top High Performance Computing centres worldwide, the combination of technologies will maintain the university's leading position in delivering ground breaking research while being an extremely good fit with the physical and environmental constraints of our facilities."

Prof. David May, Head of Computer Science and one of the Principal Investigators on the large compute and storage procurement, commented: "Collaboration is essential to the research process and continuing advancements in the pursuit of knowledge. We were particularly pleased with the long term collaboration opportunities offered by ClusterVision, IBM and ClearSpeed whose expertise, innovative technologies and resources will enable the university to remain at the forefront of research in climate modelling, visualisation and a broad spectrum of research disciplines."

The award marks the start of a long term collaboration between The University of Bristol and the consortia members ClusterVision, IBM and ClearSpeed. The collaboration will include co-development on the ClusterVisionOS, access to key individuals in IBM's research division, Blue Gene and Cell processor access, and the establishment of a ClearSpeed Centre of Competence at the university.

About the University of Bristol
The University of Bristol is "consistently one of Britain's top universities", according to The Sunday Times. Many of its departments enjoy strong international reputations in research. In the 2001 independent Research Assessment Exercise, most departments were rated at grade 5 and many achieving the highest rating of 5*. The university is equally strong in teaching, with outstanding results in the Subject Reviews of its departments. It offers an exceptional intellectual environment for both its staff and its undergraduate and postgraduate students.

About IBM
IBM is the world's largest information technology company, with 80 years of leadership in helping businesses innovate. Drawing on resources from across IBM and key IBM Business Partners, IBM offers a wide range of services, solutions and technologies that enable companies to take full advantage of the on demand era.

About ClearSpeed Technology
ClearSpeed Technology is a semiconductor company focused on delivering high-performance coprocessors to be used alongside general purpose processors in the world's most compute-intensive applications. ClearSpeed's advanced multi-threaded array processing technology provides the ability to significantly accelerate data-intensive applications at extremely low power. Products include chips, boards, software tools, applications and support. ClearSpeed has offices in San Jose, Calif. and Bristol, UK and has over 84 patents granted and pending.

About ClusterVision
ClusterVision is specialist in the design, implementation and support of small- and large-scale computer clusters. Their clustering technology provides a cost-effective alternative to traditional supercomputers by connecting multiple computers to form a unified powerful computing system. ClusterVision's team of experts has designed and built some of the largest and most complex computational, storage and database clusters in Europe. With a background in applied scientific research and practical experience with a wide range of HPC technologies, the team understands customers' requirements and provides tailor-made solutions. ClusterVision has offices in Amsterdam, Gloucester (UK), Munich, Paris, Geneva, Milan, Oslo and Madrid.

For more information
Dr ir Matthijs van Leeuwen
ClusterVision BV
Nieuw-Zeelandweg 15B
1045 AL Amsterdam
Netherlands
Tel: +31 20 407 7550
Fax: +31 84 759 8389