Edinburgh Data Intensive Machine (Phase 1)

The Edinburgh Data-Intensive Machine (EDIM1) is a compute-cluster for data-intensive research and experimentation. The product of a joint collaboration between the School of Informatics and EPCC, funded jointly by EPSRC and the University of Edinburgh, EDIM1 is designed to be more ‘Amdahl- balanced’ than existing data-intensive machines insofar as it offers the greatest possible capacity for applications to benefit from the parallelisation of any components where potential for such exists. EDIM1 also distinguishes itself by its use of commodity hardware to achieve the computational throughput of a much more expensive machine, being an attempt to bring high-performance data-intensive computation into the reach of smaller institutions and research groups in much the same manner as Beowulf clusters were for conventional compute-intensive tasks.