Emerald: e-Infrastructure South GPU supercomputer

Emerald is an HP system with 372 NVIDIA GPUs. It is housed at the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, and shared between STFC and the universities of the e-Infrastructure South consortium: Oxford, Bristol, Southampton and UCL. Some computing time will also be made available to users from industry and other universities.

It has been funded as part of a collaborative bid led by Anne Trefethen, Director of the Oxford e-Research Centre and Oxford University CIO. The GPU component of the bid was led by OeRC Associate Directors Mike Giles and Andrew Richards, and Simon McIntosh-Smith of Bristol University.

Oxford and Bristol universities have been UK leaders in GPU computing since its start in 2007, with Mike Giles becoming one of the inaugural NVIDIA CUDA Fellows in 2008. He and Simon McIntosh-Smith have also organised UK conferences on GPU computing, and provided training for GPU users on the national HECToR facility.

At a dinner in Oxford after the July 3rd e-Infrastructure South launch event at RAL, NVIDIA announced that they have made Oxford University their latest CUDA Centre of Excellence.

For further information, please see the webpages here.