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Photos: Brain of Britain
Supercomputer top of the class at Cardiff Uni

By Nick Heath

Published: Friday 07 November 2008

The Merlin computing cluster at the Cardiff University is one of the fastest supercomputers in a UK university.

The processing powerhouse at the heart of the High Performance Computing Centre of Excellence has about four million megabytes of memory and 256 standard compute nodes containing 2,048 Intel Xeon 3GHz cores. It been measured as performing 20 trillion operations per second (20 teraflops).

This puts it well inside the top 100 most powerful supercomputers in the world.

It relies on a lustre parallel file system with 38 terabytes fibre-channel disk, and an additional 50 terabytes of Sata disk storage.

The centre, seen here, is run by the university's Advanced Research Computing at Cardiff (Arcca).

Photo credit: Cardiff University