Question: What computers have you worked on?

Oliver Brown answered on 2 Jul 2020: last edited 2 Jul 2020 1:51 pm

Hi miah,

Good question! During my PhD I mostly worked on a small cluster my supervisor bought for the group which just had two workstations and no interconnect. The workstations were using server-grade processors, Intel Xeons and each had an nVidia GPU, that to be honest we never really made use of! They also each had 256GB RAM, but I still managed to crash them by using too much memory once or twice… I also used Cirrus, one of EPCC’s services, which has more Intel Xeons, 256GB RAM, but also an interconnect which allows messages to be sent very quickly between “nodes” (individual computers in the cluster) [https://www.cirrus.ac.uk/about/hardware.html].

Since starting at EPCC, I’ve continued to work on Cirrus, but also used ARCHER (https://www.archer.ac.uk/about-archer/) one of the UK’s national supercomputing services. ARCHER has 118,080 processing cores in total, and 64GB RAM per 24-core node, and a specialist interconnect. It’s actually about to be replaced with ARCHER2 which will be much larger at 748,544 cores in total. We’re looking forward to it! As well as being bigger ARCHER 2 will also have AMD processors, instead of Intel.

I’ve also worked on a couple of much smaller, more specialist computers which have new hardware in for testing — they can be difficult but fun to use!

If you’d like me to do a better job of explaining any of the computing terms I’ve used here, please just let me know in a comment 🙂