Darwin supercomputer

The University’s High Performance Computing Service has formed a partnership with Dell to address key challenges in research computing.

High performance computing (HPC) has become a fundamental enabler of research that requires data handling on a massive scale. Helping this process is the focus of the University’s HPC Service (HPCS), which supports over 120 Cambridge research groups through its large-scale, state-of-the-art computational and storage technologies.

Now, following a significant partnership with Dell, the newly launched Dell/Cambridge HPC Solution Centre aims to tackle and resolve HPC challenges identified as important by the research community, and share the solutions worldwide through ‘how-to’ white papers and targeted outreach activities. ‘This is an exciting day for Dell as the Solution Centre marks a significant new collaboration aiming to accelerate discovery,’ commented Dell’s Vice-President, Troy West.

The new partnership brings the expertise of the HPCS team at the University in providing HPC solutions to the Cambridge research community over the past five years together with the deep computing knowledge of one of the largest information technology companies worldwide.

‘We want to ‘shrink wrap’ this collective knowledge into standardised HPC solutions that other research and non-research communities can use as a template to build their own fit-for-purpose solution, without having to go through the expensive and time-consuming exploration process,’ explains Dr Paul Calleja, Director of HPCS and the Dell/Cambridge HPC Solution Centre. ‘In partnering with Dell, we have launched a new concept in HPC solution development that can deliver best-in-class HPC blueprints back to the HPC community.’

The first white paper has been released and draws on the Centre’s experiences tackling the increasing need to store up to petabytes of data by setting out a detailed recipe describing how to build a ‘storage brick’. ‘Through providing a range of standardised tested solutions,’ Dr Calleja continues, ‘we can guide users through the complex matrix of processors, networks and storage components to build solutions to real-world situations.’

For more information, please contact Kamila Lembrych (kl341@admin.cam.ac.uk), School HPC Administrator, or visit www.hpc.cam.ac.uk/


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