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First Irish supercomputer centre opened

Release date: 30 Aug 2005

Ireland's first supercomputing centre - the Irish Centre for High End Computing, (ICHEC) - will open in Dublin on 1st September 2005 with €2.6m in Science Foundation of Ireland (SFI) funding. Eight third level educational institutions are involved in the centre -- NUI Galway, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS), UCD, UCC, NUI Maynooth, Dublin City University and the Tyndall Institute. The centre, which will deliver a national research infrastructure, has also received an €0.7m equipment loan from the HEA PRTLI funded CosmoGrid programme and an equipment loan of €1.2m from TCD's HEA PRTLI funded IITAC programme. When completed, ICHEC, will address the growing need for computational resources to assist Irish researchers in their work in disciplines as diverse as medical device simulation, marine modelling, bio-informatics, drug discovery, astrophysics and computational chemistry. High End Computing, also known as 'super computing', uses the most advanced aspects of modern computer science to produce supercomputers capable of many trillions of calculations per second. With this power many physical problems can be simulated on the computer - in silica. For example it is possible in silica to determine how a surgical implant such as a stent will fatigue during its lifetime. Doing this on a computer has clear benefits over measuring the fatigue after it has been put into a patient. 'This centre will transform computational science in Ireland, creating facilities which will be on a par with those in the rest of Europe,' said Dr Andrew Shearer of NUI Galway's Department of Information Technology and the Director of ICHEC. 'Computational science is one of the few areas where Ireland can contribute to 'big' science projects. The development of the centre is the first of a three phase project with the objective of ensuring that Ireland is a leader in high end computing on a per capita basis by 2010. It is expected that the centre will be a major power house for the knowledge based economy, benefiting both Universities, SMEs - through its technology transfer work - and multi nationals. Previously Ireland's lack of supercomputing facilities meant that the country was overlooked for international science projects, according to Dr Shearer, who said that the ICHEC will help Ireland to be more competitive and continue to attract high-tech industries to the country. In addition the centre will have an industrial outreach programme to work with researchers in industries that would typically not have an interest in supercomputing. Furthermore, another programme will be developed to encourage second level students to become more interested in computer science. Irish Centre for High-End Computing homepage>>

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Article Id:  173984 Release date:  30 Aug 2005

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