Irish Centre for High-End Computing


The Irish Centre for High-End Computing is the national high-performance computing centre in Ireland. It was established in 2005 and provides supercomputing resources, support, training and related services. ICHEC is involved in education and training, including providing courses for researchers.

Kay supercomputer

ICHEC's newest supercomputer, Kay, was commissioned in August 2018 and was named after Irish-American ENIAC programmer Kathleen Antonelli following a public poll, in which the other shortlist candidates were botanist Ellen Hutchins, scientist and inventor Nicholas Callan, geologist Richard Kirwan, chemist Eva Philbin, and hydrographer Francis Beaufort. Kay's system is composed of:
Like all previous HPC systems, ICHEC is connected to the HEAnet and GÉANT networks.

Fionn supercomputer

Between 2014 and August 2018, ICHEC managed the Fionn supercomputer, a heterogeneous system composed of:
Fionn was connected to HEAnet's networking infrastructure. Irish researchers were able to apply for access to Fionn via several schemes. A helpdesk was available for user support. Fionn was replaced by Kay in August 2018.

Other ICHEC functions

ICHEC was designated a Nvidia CUDA Research Center in 2010 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 became an Intel Parallel Computing Center in 2014 to conduct research on many-core technology in high performance computing and big data analytics.
In collaboration with Met Éireann, ICHEC provides hardware and support to publish climate and weather forecast models. ICHEC computational scientists also take an active part in the ongoing development of the models and conduct related climate/environmental research.
ICHEC works with a number of Irish government departments and agencies to provide consultancy services to Irish companies in various areas including data mining, visualisation, data management and software development/optimization.