ACCELERATES

ACCELERATES is epp’s newest computational resource, a cluster with 1920 cores distributed over 80 nodes. Its estimated peak performance is 43 Tflop/s. It was funded by and named after the ERC Advanced Grant ACCELERATES and will be used by epp in future research efforts. This computational tool will have a great impact on the work developed by epp, providing the team with a critical tool to continue to be on the top of the research groups spread all over the world working in computational and theoretical plasma physics.

ACCELERATES has arrived to Técnico on September 30th 2014. For the next month, it was installed and connected in Técnico’s datacenter. After copious cabling, configuring and testing, it was left to epp members to test the use of OSIRIS and other tools, thus preparing it for production. On January 2015, ACCELERATES entered the production phase, providing epp with an extraordinary computational resource. Some of the simulations developed in ACCELERATES feature in our works, that can be accessed here.

ACCELERATES has been featured in the Intel Case Study “University of Lisbon: High-Performance Plasma Physics”. Intel highlighted epp’s new capacity of preparing large-scale Particle-In-Cell simulations (PIC) to be run on the largest super-computers in the world, as well as the opportunity given to students to access more HPC resources and gain experience in developing more complicated projects. The Intel Case Study is available here.