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back to article HPE donates 3 mini-supercomputers to UK universities boning up on Arm

HPE is donating three Apollo mini-supercomputer clusters to a trio of UK universities to help build Arm supercomputing expertise and promote its Apollo gear. The universities are the Edinburgh University's Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC), the University of Bristol, and the University of Leicester. Installation …

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  1. Aladdin Sane

    But

    can they run Crysis?

    3 4 Reply
    1. m0rt
      Reply Icon

      Re: But

      Upvote because, in a few thousand years and the universe's first antimatter linked Hypermegascalon Dimensional Thread TZR + goes online*, I hope the first reported enquiry at whatever passes for a press event then, consists of:

      "So...does it run Crysis?"

      *I say online. What I really mean is it pops up in your consiousness.

      6 2 Reply
      1. Aladdin Sane
        Reply Icon

        Re: But

        But only because Half Life 3 still hasn't been released.

        3 1 Reply
  2. Blockchain commentard

    Pity they didn't all go to one university to get a supercomputer with 'umphh' to compete with the rest of the world.

    2 2 Reply
    1. Voland's right hand Silver badge
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      You obviously never ever sold a customer half a system in anticipation of removing a few raw hides and asking for a firstborn to deliver the other half.

      4 1 Reply
    2. Korev Silver badge
      Reply Icon
      Boffin

      196 nodes / 4096 cores isn’t a huge system these days. The quickest university supercomputer in the UK (Cambridge) has 46k cores.

      1 1 Reply
      1. ToddRundgrensUtopia
        Reply Icon

        It's a test environment for HPC on ARM. You need to port the applications first, so no pint in spending millions on a massive ARM system when naff will run on it today.

        2 0 Reply
  3. Paul Johnston

    The interesting question is did they ask anyone who said no thanks!

    In the increasingly commercial world of IT provision at Universities I can see people saying no thanks.

    Rackspace and power costs both running and cooling have to be recouped somehow. The people who can pay for this stuff in Universities tend to be those running Engineering (CFD and structural analysis) and Life Sciences (sequencing data). They are the ones who get big grants which need big iron to do their work. This looks "blues skies" rather than "must have" stuff hence them "giving it away". I understand Edinburgh as it's a computing research centre but as part of a general HPC system for non Comp-Sci groups not sure how useful it would be. YMMV!

    2 2 Reply
    1. ToddRundgrensUtopia
      Reply Icon

      Re: The interesting question is did they ask anyone who said no thanks!

      I'm afraid they swings dicks in Universities too. They will find space and power it, so they can get their name on the Top500 list. I remember UCL splitting an SMP system between two data centers and wondering why it ran like a dead dog.

      2 0 Reply
  4. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

    "largely identical"

    Is that more alike or less then "almost different"?

    1 0 Reply
  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    7W per core?

    Doesn't sound all that great, given that for example you can get a 20-core Xeon which takes 135W

    Admittedly the 30kW figure is for the whole system, not just the CPUs. Presumably the real benefit is that these ARM chips are a lot cheaper than the x86 option?

    0 1 Reply
  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Exascale

    'a UK exascale computer could consume 30MW of power'

    Well they better have a decent powerplant handy and close by. Windmills and solar cells ain't gonna cut it. 30 MW is not the sort of distribution capacity that is just sitting around waiting for a customer. It's large town scale requirements.

    0 1 Reply

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