Irish Centre For High-End Computing

The Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC) is a distributed national centre providing support for research in high-performance computing and computational science in the Republic of Ireland. ICHEC was established in 2005 and is jointly funded by Science Foundation Ireland and the Higher Education Authority. The first director was Dr Andy Shearer of NUI Galway and the current director is Prof Jim Slevin, former president of the Royal Irish Academy.

As of 2010, ICHEC has 22 staff and manages four supercomputer systems: two IBM Blue Gene systems, an SGI Altix ICE blade server cluster and a Bull high memory system. ICHEC has close ties with the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and the Associate Director, Dr J-C Desplat, is an honorary professor of computational science in the School of Cosmic Physics. ICHEC works closely with the Irish Meteorological Service Met Éireann, managing the system for the operation forecast and in many climate research projects. ICHEC is part of the e-INIS (e-Irish National Infra-Structure) consortium.

ICHEC utilises HEAnet's networking infrastructure to allow access to its supercomputer systems. These supercomputer systems are:

• the Altix ICE blade server Stokes, hosted in University College Dublin
• the Bull high memory systemStoney, hosted in National University of Ireland, Galway.

ICHEC is one of seven Nvidia CUDA research centers. Its work in this area has included the porting to CUDA of the Quantum ESPRESSO and DL_POLY molecular dynamics packages as well as various industrial benchmarking studies.

ICHEC works with Enterprise Ireland and Science Foundation Ireland to provide consultancy services to Irish companies in various areas including Data mining, Visualisation, GPGPU, Data management and Software development.