The University of Cambridge has partnered with Dell to unveil a new HPC Solution Centre, which aims to be EMEA's leading HPC centre of excellence for all areas of the HPC community, whether academic or commercial. The centre will combine large-scale, commodity-based HPC infrastructure with experienced and specialised research know-how, to overcome the traditional barriers of entry to HPC, providing academic and private sector research organisations with cost-effective, readily accessible HPC solutions designed to meet 'real life' HPC challenges.
Teams from Dell, The University of Cambridge and a network of third-party HPC technology vendors will build and test research-specific HPC solutions, contributing operational excellence and best in class HPC technical blueprints back to the HPC community through a series of freely available whitepapers, technical bulletins and targeted outreach activities.
The University of Cambridge is a world-leading teaching and research institution, consistently ranked within the top three universities worldwide. The university also forms the central hub of Europe's largest technology centre with more than 1,200 technology companies located in science parks surrounding the city and boasting Europe's largest bio-technology centre.
The Solution Centre will be based out of the existing Cambridge HPC Service building, a facility already being used for delivering HPC services via a cloud computing model. The HPC cluster supports around 400 internal users spread across 70 research groups ranging from traditional hard sciences such as chemistry, physics and biology, through to areas rapidly growing in popularity for HPC-based research such as bio-medicine, clinical-medicine and social sciences.
Dr Paul Calleja, director of the HPC service at the University of Cambridge, said: 'The Solutions Centre has been founded with the overriding mandate of providing accessible research computing services and technology to organisations that would otherwise not have the money or expertise to benefit from such advantages, whether they are from academic or private sector backgrounds. We have amassed a considerable and focused pool of expertise and compute power that we hope will help speed up research within a wide range of fields. For researchers taking their first steps into HPC, we can provide the perfect platform to trial applications and for those looking to take things to a new level, we have the necessary support and understanding to really get research off the ground. By partnering with Dell we have been able to launch a new concept in HPC solution development and we’re looking forward to helping organisations overcome the initial barriers to entry by contributing operational excellence and best in class HPC blueprints back to the HPC community.'
