HPCx: A new resource for UK computational science

We introduce HPCx the UK's new National HPC Service which aims to deliver a world-class service for capability computing to the UK scientific community. HPCx is targeting an environment that will both result in world-leading science and address the challenges involved in scaling existing codes to the capability levels required. Close working relationships with scientific consortia and user groups throughout the research process will be a central feature of the service. A significant number of key user applications have already been ported to the system. We present initial benchmark results from this process and discuss the optimisation of the codes and the performance levels achieved. We find a range of performance with some algorithms scaling far better than others.