Third-level institutes to build supercomputer

Eight third-level institutions have teamed up to build the biggest supercomputer in the history of the State in Dublin.

The computer, which will be capable of storing up to 100 terabytes of data - equivalent to five times the entire contents of the 130 million-item US Library of Congress - will work on a range of projects such as modelling the Irish seabed.

The IBM computer will form the cornerstone of the Republic's first national centre for high-end computing, which will begin operating this week at three centres in Cork, Galway and Dublin.

The centre will be funded initially through grants worth up to €4.5 million from Science Foundation Ireland and the Higher Education Authority. Further funding will be required to complete two extra phases of the supercomputer project, which aims to make Ireland a leader in high-end computing by 2010.

Currently no supercomputer in the Republic makes the prestigious global list of the Top 500 supercomputers. But the new IBM computer should boost Ireland to about 100th on the list, according to Dr Andrew Shearer, director of the Irish Centre for High End Computing (ICHEC).

Dr Shearer, who is based at NUI Galway, said the centre and the new IBM supercomputer would transform computational science in Ireland, creating facilities that would be on a par with the rest of Europe.

"Ireland's ability to compete for international science projects has been hindered by the lack of computational resources, with no machines in the country making the prestigious Top 500 supercomputer list," he said.

A consortium, including IBM and HEAnet Limited, has been chosen to build the new supercomputer, which will have a cluster of 500 nodes of two computers with four to eight gigabytes of memory.

Bull Information Systems has also been contracted to build a separate memory system for the new supercomputer centre.

Use of these computers will be shared between the following Irish educational institutes: NUI Galway; Trinity College; UCD; UCC; the Tyndall Institute; NUI Maynooth and the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies.