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HECToR - Supercomputers
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HECToR
hector phase3.jpg
General Info
SponsorsEPSRC,
NERC,
BBSRC
DesignersCray
OperatorsEPCC
IntroductionOctober 2007
RetiredMarch 24 2014
Peak FLOPS829 teraFLOPS
Price$85,000,000
Succession

HECToR (High-End Computing Terascale Resource) was terascale x86 supercomputer serving as the UK's primary academic research supercomputer. HECToR has been superseded by ARCHER.

Overview

HECToR was a UK academic national supercomputer service funded by NERC, EPSRC, and BBSRC for the academic community. HECTor was deployed in a number of phases with each phase upgrading it to over double the performance.

Phases

HECToR underwent 5 major upgrades.

Cores Peak Compute
11,328 63.44 teraFLOPS
12,288 113.05 teraFLOPS
22,656 208.44 teraFLOPS
44,544 366.74 teraFLOPS
90,112 829.01 teraFLOPS

Phase 1

Phase 1 was the initial system was based on the Cray XT4 (Rainier) system. The system comprised of 1416 compute blades across 60 cabinets. There are four sockets per blade. The processors are dual-core AMD Opteron operating at 2.8 GHz. There is 6 GB of memory per socket for a total system memory of 33.2 TiB. Rainier had a peak compute performance of 63.44 teraFLOPS.

Type Count
Nodes 1,416
CPUs 5,664
Cores 11,328

In addition to the computational nodes, there were 24 additional service blades with dual-socket dual-core processors that were used for facilitating the supercomputer services such as login, control, and network management.

The system relies on Cray SeaStar2 interconnect. There's one SeaStar2 chip for every two node which comes with 6 network links. The network implements a 3D-torus. The MPI point-to-point bandwidth is was 2.17 GB/s, with a minimum bi-section bandwidth of 4.1 TB/s, and with a node-to-node latency of around 6 μs.

The memory subsystem:

Type Capacity
Direct attached storage 576 TiB
NAS storage 40 TiB
MAID storage 56 TiB
Tape drives 3 TiB

Phase 1b

The system was upgraded in August 2008 with a small vector system. 28 Cray X2 (Black Widow) vector compute nodes were added. Each node had 4 Cray vector processor. There are 32 GiB of memory for node for a total of 896 GiB of memory.

Type Count
Nodes 28
CPUs 112

With each vector processor capable of 25.6 gigaFLOPS, the new addition adds 2.87 teraFLOPS of compute to the existing system. The MPI point-to-point bandwidth is was 16 GB/s, with a minimum bi-section bandwidth of 254 GB/s, and with a node-to-node latency of around 4.6 μs.

The memory has also been upgraded.

Type Capacity
Direct attached storage 934 TiB
NAS storage 70 TiB
MAID storage 112 TiB
Tape drives 6 TiB

Phase 2

Phase 2a
Phase 2a
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Phase 3

Phase 3

HECToR Phase 3 is a Cray XE6 supercomputer. The system comprises 704 compute blades across 30 cabinets. Each blade incorporates four compute nodes. Within a compute node are two 16-core AMD Opteron 2.3GHz Interlagos-based processors.

Type Count
Nodes 2,816
CPUs 5,632
Cores 90,112

There are 16 GiB of memory per socket for a total system memory of 88 TiB. With 90,112 cores, the system had a peak compute performance of 829 teraFLOPS. In addition to the computational nodes, there are 16 additional blades with two dual-core processors per node which is used for various services such as login, control, and network management.

The system relies on Cray Gemini interconnect. There's one Gemini chip for every two node which comes with 10 network links. The network implements a 3D-torus. The MPI point-to-point bandwidth is >= 5 GB/s with a node-to-node latency of around 1-1.5μs.

  • high-performance RAID disks: >1 PiB
  • Network Attached Storage: 70 TiB
  • MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks): 168 TiB

TOP500

List Phase Rank Rmax Rpeak
11/2007 Phase 1 17 54.6 63.4
06/2008 30
11/2008 47
06/2009 68
11/2010 Phase 2a 78 95.1 113.0
06/2011 94
11/2009 Phase 2b 20 174.1 208.4
06/2010 26
06/2010 Phase 2b 16 274.7 366.7
11/2010 25
06/2011 Phase 3 24 660.2 829.0
11/2011 19
06/2012 32
11/2012 35
06/2013 41
11/2013 50
06/2014 59
11/2014 79
06/2015 105
designerCray +
discontinuation dateMarch 24 2014 +
introductory dateOctober 2007 +
logoFile:hector phase3.jpg +
nameHECToR +
operatorEPCC +
peak flops (double-precision)829,000,000,000,000 FLOPS (829,000,000,000 KFLOPS, 829,000,000 MFLOPS, 829,000 GFLOPS, 829 TFLOPS, 0.829 PFLOPS, 8.29e-4 EFLOPS, 8.29e-7 ZFLOPS) +
release price$ 85,000,000.00 (€ 76,500,000.00, £ 68,850,000.00, ¥ 8,783,050,000.00) +
sponsorEPSRC +, NERC + and BBSRC +