Upgrade for "Hawk" supercomputer
28 January 2020
The University’s supercomputer, “Hawk” has now undergone a major upgrade having secured capital funding for the Cardiff Supercomputing Facility Phase 2 expansion.
This Phase 2 expansion has been funded jointly by University Executive Board (UEB) and the Higher Education Council for Wales (HEFCW) and provides the Cardiff HPC research community with new compute capabilities comprising 65 × dual processor AMD Rome 7502 nodes to supplement the existing Intel Skylake compute resource.
It will provide an additional 4,160 cores of X86-64 capability. The increasing demand for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Deep Learning resources will be addressed through an extended GPU partition, with an additional 15 × Nvidia V100 dual-GPU nodes to augment the current Nvidia P100 dual-GPU nodes.
The existing Lustre storage partition will also be expanded to provide an additional 500 TBytes of parallel file storage capacity. The installation of the Phase 2 hardware was completed in December 2019 and these new resources will soon be accessible by the user community following successful completion of the associated acceptance testing.
In addition to meeting the increasing demands from research groups for supercomputing capacity for existing and pipeline research projects, Phase 2 developments will also provide enhanced capabilities and resources to further support increased activities in AI and Data Science through enhancement of the High-Performance Data Analytics (HPDA) platform “Sparrow”.