DiRAC

Distributed Research using Advanced Computing (DiRAC)
Location
Services Supercomputing
Parent organization
 Science and Technology Facilities Council
Website dirac.ac.uk

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]

DiRAC and DiRAC II

Initially DiRAC was funded with an investment of £12 million from of 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:

  1. University of Cambridge HPC Service with 10000 cores and 1 Petabyte clustered file system
  2. Cambridge Cosmos shared memory Service with 1856 cores, 14 Terabytes of globally shared memory with Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors
  3. University of Leicester IT Services with 4352 cores and nonblocking minimal spanning switches
  4. The Institute for Computational Cosmology (ICC) at Durham University Service with 6500 cores[3]
  5. 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

  1. 1 2 "DiRAC - Science and Technology Facilities Council". stfc.ac.uk.
  2. 1 2 "What makes DiRAC special". dirac.ac.uk.
  3. ↑ "The Cosmology Machine (COSMA)". icc.dur.ac.uk.
  4. ↑ "DiRAC BlueGene/Q". epcc.ed.ac.uk.
  5. ↑ 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.
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