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An article in Biotechnology Ireland: First Irish supercomputer centre opened. [30-Aug-05]

Ireland's first supercomputing centre - the Irish Centre for High End Computing, (ICHEC) - was opened in Dublin on 1st September 2005 with €2.6m in Science Foundation of Ireland (SFI) funding.

Eight third level educational institutions are involved in the centre -- NUI Galway, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS), UCD, UCC, NUI Maynooth, Dublin City University and the Tyndall Institute. ( NUI Galway is where DERI Galway is located )

When completed, ICHEC, will address the growing need for computational resources to assist Irish researchers in their work in disciplines as diverse as medical device simulation, marine modelling, bio-informatics, drug discovery, astrophysics and computational chemistry.

'This centre will transform computational science in Ireland, creating facilities which will be on a par with those in the rest of Europe,' said Dr Andrew Shearer of NUI Galway's Department of Information Technology and the Director of ICHEC. 'Computational science is one of the few areas where Ireland can contribute to 'big' science projects.

Main computing power in ICHEC is a distributed memory IBM eServer cluster 1350 (walton) consisting of 948 Opteron@2.4GHz CPUs with total RAM of 2.1 Tb and storage of 20 Tb in a high-performance SAN based around IBM DS4500.

The performance of 4.55 TFlops/s peak and 2.79 TFlops/s max would put it approximately in place #120 in the List of World's TOP 500 Supercomputing Sites.