UK universities offer industry 300 teraflops of CORE HPC

Two of the UK's top universities, the University of Cambridge and Imperial College London, have launched what they say is the most business-ready high-performance computing and e-infrastructure service in the country.

The <="" a="" class="c-regularLink" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">CORE Cloud; was developed using <="" a="" class="c-regularLink" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">government funding; that was earmarked last year for improving the country's e-infrastructure and HPC facilities. In aggregate, the cloud uses more than 22,000 Intel processor cores and three petabytes of high-performance file system to provide over 300 teraflops of double-precision computing capacity.

"CORE is the most comprehensive e-infrastructure cloud and consultancy service available today, with strong emphasis on business-ready industry focused solutions," Cambridge CORE director Paul Calleja said in a statement. "CORE demonstrates proven UK leadership in HPC and big data design, implementation and service provision for both SMB and enterprise-scale customers across a range of disciplines including engineering, life sciences, materials modelling and digital media."

According to the CORE team, the cloud's HPC cluster and shared memory space are the largest in the UK, and the Nvidia GPU cluster one of the largest. Customers for the CORE Cloud include Rolls-Royce, Caterham F1 Team and sound analysis firm Audio Analytic.

Along with the cloud itself, the CORE team also offers "a full portfolio of consultancy offerings for partners looking to deploy their own in-house systems". However, Calleja noted, e-infrastructure clusters such as CORE make it unnecessary for many organisations to build complex in-house infrastructure.