The computer cluster, named after Copernicus' famous book, arrived in February of this year with installation and commissioning taking several months. The cluster is based on Intel E5-2650 v4 processors with 128GB RAM on each node (about 5GB per core). Each node of the cluster houses 24 cores meaning that the cluster is built of 67 nodes (a node refers to each server unit that the cluster is built of). In the past, this would amount to one of the beige boxes on a shelf. Nowadays, however, clusters utilize a high density, rack-mounted design, the density of which is limited by thermal management constraints.
We expect that DeRevolutionibus will be used to run the well-established plasma simulation codes that the community uses such as EPOCH, OSIRIS and FLASH.
One of the real benefits of DeRevolutionibus for the CLF is that it is sufficiently large enough for a user to run a calculation with up to 1500 cores and consequently be able to do 3D simulations of problems of interest to many of our users. This will also mean that we will be able to publish our results faster in the highest quality journals.
