DiRAC
Distributed Research using Advanced Computing (DiRAC) is an integrated supercomputing facility used for research in particle physics, astronomy and cosmology in the United Kingdom. DiRAC makes use of multi-core processors and provides a variety of computer architectures for use by the research community.[1][2]
Location | |
---|---|
Services | Supercomputing |
Parent organization | Science and Technology Facilities Council |
Website | dirac |
DiRAC and DiRAC II
Initially DiRAC was funded with an investment of £12 million from the Government of the United Kingdom's Large Facilities Capital Fund combined with funds from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and a consortium of universities in the UK. In 2012, the DiRAC facility was upgraded with a further £15 million[1][2] of UK government capital to create DiRAC II which has five installations:
- University of Cambridge HPC Service with 10000 cores and 1 Petabyte clustered file system
- Cambridge Cosmos shared memory Service with 1856 cores, 14 Terabytes of globally shared memory with Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors
- University of Leicester IT Services with 4352 cores and nonblocking minimal spanning switches
- The Institute for Computational Cosmology (ICC) at Durham University Service with 6500 cores[3]
- University of Edinburgh 6144 node IBM Blue Gene/Q with 65000 cores and torus interconnects at EPCC[4]
Paul Dirac
DiRAC is a backronym which honours the theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Paul Dirac.[5]
References
- "DiRAC - Science and Technology Facilities Council". stfc.ac.uk.
- "What makes DiRAC special". dirac.ac.uk.
- "The Cosmology Machine (COSMA)". icc.dur.ac.uk.
- "DiRAC BlueGene/Q". epcc.ed.ac.uk.
- Dalitz, Richard H.; Peierls, Rudolf (1986). "Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac. 8 August 1902 – 20 October 1984". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. London: Royal Society. 32: 138. doi:10.1098/rsbm.1986.0006. JSTOR 770111.