Hewlett Packard Enterprise and the University iof Southampton have announced the sixth generation high-performance computing cluster, Iridis 6. The new system is a vital upgrade and expands existing resources of Iridis 5 to advance research in areas such as genomics, aerodynamics, and renewable batteries. New technology from HPE does this more sustainably and with higher performance than the previous generation.
Chris Yorke, Associate Director Research IT, University of Southampton, commented: “Throughout the past year, we’ve seen an increased demand for HPC capabilities, with our exceptional community of over 24,000 students and researchers, driven by a growth in AI research cases and numbers of joint projects with local and regional businesses.
"At the same time, we are very conscious of the fact that our HPC systems are responsible for a significant part of our energy consumption, Yorke continured. "To align with our sustainability strategy for Iridis 6, we required a system that would deliver exponentially higher performance at a lower power consumption – and HPE’s expertise in building energy-efficient HPC systems was crucial in achieving this. With the HPE ProLiant servers, we found a solution that provides four times the performance, needing only 70% of the power compared to the system it replaces.”
The University of Southampton is a research-intensive university and a founding member of the Russell Group, which represents 24 UK universities. The university provides some of the largest UK-based HPC resources to public and commercial sectors and offers consultancy and research services to UK businesses. Southampton views high-performance computing as a strategic enabler of its research, driving key projects of international scale, such as the effects of large constellations and satellites in space, and other innovations. Iridis 6 is part of the university’s ongoing, significant investments in high-performance computing, including advancements in power efficiency.
Matt Harris Senior vice president and managing director, UK, Ireland, Middle East and Africa at HPE, stated: "Investing in state-of-the-art high performance computing infrastructure is crucial to ensure that the UK's prized scientific and research communities have the tools they need to be globally competitive," said Matt Harris, senior vice president and managing director, UK, Ireland, Middle East and Africa at HPE. "The University of Southampton's major investment in Iridis 6 will support the next wave of scientific breakthroughs. We are proud to be helping the University accelerate research and innovation that will contribute to growing the science and technology ecosystem in the UK."
The new system was built using the HPE ProLiant Gen11 servers, powered by 4th Generation AMD EPYC processors, to provide advanced performance to support computational science at-scale, requiring modelling and simulation. In addition, the University of Southampton leveraged HPE Services to provide dedicated onsite support in building, testing, and deploying Iridis 6 to optimise workloads to efficiently process compute and data-intensive research.
