University cluster boasts 182 terabytes of storage

A new high-performance computer cluster, which will play a leading role in international scientific research, has been announced by Sir Alan Sugar, chairman of Viglen Ltd.

The cluster has been developed by Viglen, which specialises in computers and IT solutions, and the Department of Physics at Queen Mary, University of London.

The system, which has 182 terabytes of storage, has recently been expanded with 280 custom-built Viglen dual dual-core Opteron Processor 2GHz servers, each with 2Gb SDRAM supplied in a 1U rack-mountable configuration and dual Gigabit Ethernet.

It will join with other clusters in the UK and overseas, forming a phenomenally powerful computing grid of over 100,000 processors.

The grid will be part of the Grid Particle Physics (GridPP) project, which will analyse data from the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator, which opens later this year at CERN, the European particle physics laboratory in Switzerland. It will be a key part of the project’s investigation into the fundamental properties of matter.

In addition to particle physics, the cluster will be available to scientists involved in a whole range of research, including the search for a cure for avian flu and the design of fusion reactors.