The Central Simulation Facility was the third service introduced around this time to take over, and enable the expansion of, the IBM 3090's scientific computing workload. It was developed as a joint project between the RAL Central Computing and Particle Physics Departments as a clone of the Central Simulation Facility at CERN, and was provided for particle physics users only.
The Facility initially used six Hewlett Packard HP9000 model 735 RISC workstations, each with 48 MB of memory and 1 GB of disk and the computing power of about four IBM 3090 processors. The workstations were interconnected via FDDI and had access to the Atlas Data Store.
The Facility was ideally suited to Monte Carlo Simulations in which the computational work required of each processor was essentially independent of that required of the others, and the input/output traffic was relatively light. Later its use was widened to include general analysis and work with higher input/output traffic which could benefit from the proximity of the Data Store.
