Joint Supercomputer at Home in Iceland

National high performance computing organizations of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Iceland have pooled resources to build a joint supercomputer in Iceland. The innovative project is hosted in the Advania Thor Data Center in Iceland, a new environmentally friendly “green” data center.

According to the announcement, the supercomputer is part of a pilot initiative to test remote hosting, such that computing is brought to the energy source and not vice versa, thereby introducing substantial savings. Because of growing power consumption, “supercomputing costs are an increasing economic burden for researchers and their universities. Iceland is an attractive location, with powerful natural resources providing very low-cost electricity and cost-efficient cooling solutions. The Scandinavian countries spend millions of Euros every year on supercomputers and their electricity consumption.”

The project is the result of collaboration between the Danish Center for Scientific Computing, the Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing, UNINETT Sigma, and the University of Iceland. The system was delivered by Hewlett-Packard via Opin kerfi and has 3456 compute cores in 288 nodes. You can read more at http://nhpc.hi.is.