ARCHER2 – 4 cabinets ship from the US
By Lorna Smith on July 3, 2020
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Covid-19 has created significant challenges for the delivery of the new ARCHER2 system. It is therefore really exciting to see the first 4 cabinets of ARCHER2 leave Cray/HPE’s factory in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin to begin their journey to Edinburgh.
ARCHER2 will replace the current ARCHER system, a Cray XC30, as the UK’s National HPC system. Once fully configured, this should provide an average of over 11 times the science throughput of ARCHER.
The full ARCHER2 system will consist of 23 Shasta Mountain cabinets giving a total of 748,544 cores with 1.57 PBytes of total system memory and an estimated peak performance of 28 PFLOP/s. As one of the first sites in Europe to receive Shasta Mountain cabinets, we are looking forward to investigating these and their performance, then getting our users on the system.
ARCHER2 will replace ARCHER in two stages. The first stage will be for four cabinets to be built and brought in to operation, at which point ARCHER will be decommissioned and the remaining 19 cabinets delivered and built.
Having left Chippewa Falls on the 1st July, the cabinets have been transported by road to Chicago O’Hare airport, Illinois. They leave Chicago today, 3rd July, to fly to Luxembourg, before being transported by road to London Heathrow to clear customs. They will then continue to Prestwick Airport for final clearance before arriving in Edinburgh on the 13th July. We will be posting blogs and pictures of the 4 cabinets as they arrive in Edinburgh, so keep an eye on the blog and twitter account for further updates.