Ghent University is committed to be an important partner in the Flemish Supercomputer Center and also continues to invest in supercomputing, which is fully in line with the strategic objectives of our university. Our university finances over 600k€ per year in HPC, i.e. investments in infrastructure, staff (support, maintenance and coordination) and operational expenses (cooling, power, etc.). In 2011 we also opened a new datacenter, with a state-of-the-art supercomputing room (additional investment of 3M€). The HPC room will host tier-2 equipment and the first Flemish tier-1 supercomputer.

Both KULeuven as UGent are very committed to host, in turn, a tier-1 supercomputer. Mid 2012, the first Flemish supercomputer will be taken into production in Gent. The system will remain operational until 2015. Tailored to the commissioning of the second tier-1 in Leuven, the UGent system will be eventually deployed in the tier-2 grid. From 2017 onwards UGent will host the third tier-1.

European HPC ecosystem

Below, a representation is given of the European HPC ecosystem pyramid which was defined by the European Commission.

At the top of the pyramid there are the super-supercomputers. The first tier-0 is located in Jülich (Duitsland) and there is one installed in France near Paris. The European tier-0-research infrastructure will be further strengthened  with two machines in Munich and Stuttgart. These type of computers have a size of 2 to 5 petaflop (10¹⁵ FLoating point OPerations per Second).

The operating costs of these large supercomputers are not to be underestimated. The energy cost alone is enormous. The current average tier-0 ('petascale') have a capacity of around 2 MW, and with the ambitious race to an exascale platform (FLOPS 10¹⁸), the consumption may reach up to 20MW in 2018.

Flanders is already working on the next generation of tier-0 systems, particularly in the field of software development: in collaboration with the five Flemish universities, Imec and Intel the Flemish government has set up the Flanders Excascience Lab .

The next level, which in Europe is called Tier-1, are national and/or regional supercomputers which have sufficient computing power for the mainstream European supercomputer user. This is an important layer because a tier-1 infrastructure allows the build-up of the necessary expertise and knowledge required to develop and use a tier-0-supercomputer. These systems currently have an average size of 100 to 200 TeraFLOPS. Flanders will inaugurate their first tier-1 in 2012, which will be a first step towards Flanders being part of the European HPC ecosystem.

This bottom layer of the pyramid consists of local and smaller supercomputers which typically can be found at the different research institutions. A tier-2 today typically has a size of 10 to 30 teraflops. In recent years, the universities deployed many tier-2 clusters which are currently being linked in a tier-2 grid.