Professor Stephen Hawking's UK COSMOS consortium is Europe's leading group of investigators studying all aspects of cosmology - from simulating the origins of the universe to investigating theories of how we see it today. The consortium, which is supported by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), includes 28 investigators at ten UK institutions, as well as international collaborators who are able to make use of its resources.

Substantial increases in speed and energy efficiency, compared to its previous Altix 3700 system were crucial in securing funding for the upgrade.

The global cosmology community is a highly competitive environment, where investigators are looking to solve problems quickly in a rapidly moving field. "Our large set of investigators have unique interdisciplinary strengths with which to tackle the big set of problems we're trying to solve", explained Dr. Paul Shellard from the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP) at Cambridge University. "These range from predicting the creation of the early universe, and running field theory simulations a fraction of a nanosecond after the Big Bang, to people investigating the CGB and trying to find correlations in the distribution of galaxies."

"The SGI Altix is therefore a very important system for competitive reasons, because we need resources that can provide solutions in a short timescale for non-expert users across a very broad mix of applications. The Altix's shared-memory capabilities let us test our ideas quickly and painlessly, and its scalability is important so that we can address the big problems in cosmology."

The latest COSMOS upgrade was funded by consortium members including the Universities of Central Lancashire, Portsmouth, Sussex, Manchester, and Durham. "We've been involved in COSMOS for the last four years, and in terms of 'bang for its buck' it's been an incredible investment", stated Professor Bob Nichol from Portsmouth University's Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation. "For ten years COSMOS has been at the forefront of cosmological research. It's run so well, and the relationship between SGI and the staff at Cambridge is so unique, that they've made the system easy to use, it's up all the time, well maintained, and the people looking after it are incredibly professional. Because we have unrestricted access to COSMOS, I can just go and experiment, and that's been wonderful."

An existing SGI Altix customer, the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) not only provided part of the funding for the latest COSMOS upgrade, but also upgraded its own system, as did the University of Portsmouth. UCLan joined the consortium in June 2007 to take advantage of COSMOS's power for particularly demanding simulations.

"In CGB and dark energy experiments such as the Planck Surveyor, there's some 'messy' physics involved in interpreting the observations, and that's where we see a large part of our role within the consortium", stated Professor Brad Gibson, Chair, Theoretical Astrophysics, University of Central Lancashire Centre for Astrophysics. "We're in uncharted territory with the Dark Energy Survey, CGB, Planck etc. These are unprecedented experiments that require exploration of the parameter base to see what might or might not be observed. We also have a rapidly growing base of users demanding access to larger and more powerful facilities, and the way COSMOS is set up is a perfect match for what we want to do."

To enable the COSMOS consortium to purchase its new machine, SGI took an innovative approach to securing the project's financing.

"At the time we were discussing the latest upgrade, the COSMOS consortium was not due to receive any significant public funding for anything up to a year. We therefore looked at how we could find an intermediate solution", explained SGI UK Sciences Manager, Simon Appleby. "SGI provided evidence that in terms of power costs, floor space and performance, the Altix 4700 is more efficient in all areas. This allowed a very strong, compelling business case to be presented not just to the DAMTP at Cambridge, but to all the UK COSMOS consortium members."

"The result was that within three weeks, SGI was able to upgrade the COSMOS machine to a uniquely scalable, highly cost/performance efficient solution, based on the very latest dual-core Intel Itanium 2 processors. The Altix 4700 has also subsequently been expanded with extra CPUs and memory at the request of further COSMOS members. This will put the whole of the UK COSMOS consortium in an even better position, not only in terms of quicker time to discovery."

"The UK theoretical cosmology community is easily the strongest in Europe and leads the world in many areas", concluded Professor Stephen Hawking. "I have been principal investigator of COSMOS for ten years, and at our launch I said, 'We need the COSMOS supercomputer to calculate what our theories of the early universe predict and test them against the new observational results that are coming in'. This is now more true than ever. Observations of the microwave sky have transformed cosmology into a precise science, and this advance has been recognized by the latest Nobel Prize in Physics."