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 was funded as part of a collaborative bid led by Anne Trefethen who
was then 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 2009. 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, 2012 e-Infrastructure South launch
event at RAL, NVIDIA
announced
that they had made Oxford University their latest CUDA Centre of Excellence,
with later turned into a
GPU Centre of Excellence.