Shorthand

Meiko

1987-1999

THE PROCUREMENT OF THE FIRST MEIKO T800 COMPUTING SURFACE (CS) MACHINE LED TO THE Edinburgh Concurrent Supercomputer Project: THE IMMEDIATE PREDECESSOR OF THE EDINBURGH PARALLEL COMPUTING CENTRE (EPCC).

Motivated by the use of a T414 Computing Surface system, funding was obtained from The Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and The Department of Trade & Industry to procure a Meiko T800 CS system.

Initially hosted by a VAX running VMS, which acted as the front-end for 200 T800 processors running on the back-end, this system eventually grew to contain 400 T800 processors.

Right: David Wallace.

"The Department of Physics at the University of Edinburgh had already bought a small Meiko CS system – a 40-processor T414 Computing Surface system that wasn't a serious compute engine for QCD [Quantum Chromo Dynamics] problems, as it didn’t have the computational oomph. But it was an interesting learning experience for us, dealing with a MIMD architecture, compared with the old DAP SIMD. We did look at a few particle physics calculations, but they were really toy calculations, rather than QCD in anger". Professor Ken Bowler

Early simulations on the Meiko systems studied the Potts Model, a simplified model of the formation of magnetic domains. This provided insight into the behaviour of ferromagnets.

THE MEIKO T800 CS SYSTEM INITIATED THE VERY SUCCESSFUL UKQCD GROUP.

UKQCD's need to do many calculations very quickly for their lattice gauge number-crunching fuelled the desire for ever more powerful computing platforms to be hosted at the University of Edinburgh.

The second smaller i860 machine of 16 processors was procured as part of a collaboration with the Car-Parrinello Consortium led by Southampton University.

Image: ab initio MD simulation showing the dynamics of dissociative chemisorption. Animation by A. De Vita, University of Keele.

This consortium, now known as UKCP, is a major user of ARCHER and is focused on the application of quantum mechanics to understand and predict the properties of materials.

Evolution of the system

In October 1992 the T800-based system was reconfigured as a SPARC-hosted Computing Surface, thus replacing the VAX machine, with three SPARC "host" processors running SunOS. The system was known as the Edinburgh Concurrent Supercomputer and was used by a large number of projects, both academic and commercial, before it was decommissioned in August 1994.

Meiko i860/maxwell (1990-1996): Following the success of the first CS system, the UK Nuclear Physics Board of the Science Research Council funded the purchase of the Meiko i860. With a peak performance of 5 gigaflops, this was a powerful machine by the standards of the time: it was the fastest in the UK, if not Europe, and the QCD code was one of the very first science codes anywhere to exceed 1 GF sustained. In 1992, this system's memory was increased and a smaller second machine of 16 processors was procured as part of a collaboration with the Car-Parrinello Consortium led by Southampton University. Processors: 64 Intel i860 Peak performance: 2.56 Gflop/s. Architecture: MIMD Memory 8Mb/processor -> 16 Mb/process (after upgrade). Programming: Fortran 77, C, CHIMP, PARMACS, Meiko CSTools.

Edinburgh Concurrent Supercomputer (1987-1994) Processors: 400 T800. Peak performance: 0.5 Gflop/s. Architecture: MIMD Memory: 4Mb/processor -> ~1.6Gb of distributed memory. Programming: Occam.

jurassic (1995-1999) Peak performance: 2Gflop/s. Architecture: MIMD Programming: C, C++, F77, MPI, PVM.