HPE has supplied the University of Southampton in the UK with a high-performance computing system Iridis 6, built on the AMD hardware platform. It is planned to use the supercomputer to conduct research in areas such as genomics, aerodynamics and next-generation power supplies.
Iridis 6 is based on HPE ProLiant Gen11 servers powered by AMD EPYC Genoa processors. 138 nodes are involved, each of which has 192 computing cores and carries 3 TB of memory on board. Thus, a total of 26,496 cores are used.
Specifically, Iridis 6 includes four nodes with 6.6 TB of local storage, as well as three entry nodes with 15 TB of storage. Infiniband HDR100 interconnect is used. HPE reported that the system currently provides HPL (High-Performance Linpack) performance of approximately 1 Pflops. In the future, it is planned to increase the number of nodes, which will improve performance.
Image source: NRE
It is noted that Iridis 6 replaces the Iridis 4 supercomputer, which had a little more than 12 thousand computing cores. At the same time, the new system will coexist with the Iridis 5 complex, which uses Intel Xeon Gold 6138, AMD 7452 and AMD 7502 processors, as well as NVIDIA Tesla V100, GTX 1080 Ti and A100 accelerators. This machine was launched in 2018 and took 354th place in the TOP500 list of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, published in June of the same year. The performance of Iridis 5 reaches 1.31 Pflops.