ARCHER

ARCHER is the current UK National Supercomputing Service. 

ARCHER allows researchers from industry and academia to run simulations and calculations that require large numbers of processing cores working in a tightly-coupled, parallel fashion.

RESEARCH: MODELLING GLOBAL MANTLE CONVECTION AND SINGLE-SIDED SUBDUCTION ON EARTH

Using ARCHER, scientists have produced a dynamically fully self-consistent, 3D numerical model of global mantle convection and single-sided subduction on Earth. Simulations have reproduced the thermal convection inside our planet's mantle, including plate tectonics at the surface. It can self-consistently produce the nature-like single-sided sinking of the colliding plates.

The image shows a snapshot of a time-dependent, three-dimensional and fully spherical model of the Earth's mantle. Visible are cold, stiff surface plates (grey) sinking into the mantle and upwelling plumes of hot material (red) from the core-mantle boundary.

RESEARCH: Albatern - Numerical Simulation of Extremely Large Interconnected Wavenet Arrays

Albatern is a wave energy technology company that develops novel offshore marine devices: buoyant "Squid" modules with three arms that are each capable of linking with up to three other such Squids. The linking of three Squid devices forms a hexagonal arrangement, and these can interlink to form arbitrarily large “Wavenet” installations.

The Squid modules and their link-arms contain mechanisms to generate power, capturing the heave and surge motion of the waves via hydraulics. This technology therefore offers a highly-scalable, modular wave power generator. 

However, wave energy prototypes are large and expensive to produce, and are funded through risk capital. Computer simulation helps to reduce the risk of design flaws, and therefore forms a vital part of the device design process. 

Albatern's modelling was limited by the available software to individual Squid devices and Wavenet arrays of up to 6 devices. Using ARCHER, the goal is to develop of a computer code capable of simulating a large array (100 or more) of these devices on supercomputers such as ARCHER. 

Since the start of this project, Albartern has deployed its first power-generating array of the Island of Muck, on the West Coast of Scotland. The array, comprising three Squid devices, will supply a fish farm with electrical power to run lighting and feeding equipment.

There are 4920 compute nodes in ARCHER Phase 2, each with two 12-core Intel Ivy Bridge series processors. This gives a total of 118,080 processing cores. A high-performance Lustre storage system is available to all compute nodes. There is no local disk on the compute nodes as they are housed in 4-node blades.

The Service started in November 2013 and is expected to run for 5 years.