Hpcx: Towards Capability Computing

We introduce HPCx - the U.K.'s new National HPC Service - which aims to deliver a world-class service for capability computing to the U.K. scientific community. HPCx is targeting an environment that will both result in world-leading science and address the challenges involved in scaling existing codes to the capability levels required. Close working relationships with scientific consortia and user groups throughout the research process will be a central feature of the service. A significant number of key user applications have already been ported to the system. We present initial benchmark results from this process and discuss the optimization of the codes and the performance levels achieved on HPCx in comparison with other systems. We find a range of performance with some algorithms scaling far better than others. Copyright (c) 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.