Scientists at the University of Cambridge have been leveraging an advanced higher performance computing and storage infrastructure to conduct research in a number of fields. By partnering with Dell EMC and Intel, the HPC Solution Centre is providing the capabilities needed to make breakthrough discoveries in healthcare, high energy physics, astronomy, and industry.

The problems being investigated in these vastly different areas all need the latest compute and storage technologies. Typically, the researchers in these fields work with very large volumes of data. The data must be quickly analyzed, visualized, modeled, and shared. And in most cases, the data must be maintained indefinitely and made accessible to be analyzed at different points in time as new algorithms and exploration methods are generated.

To accomplish all of this requires a hardware infrastructure (including servers, storage, and networking elements) that is highly scalable. The infrastructure must be flexible enough to support the wide variety of workloads found in today’s leading science labs.

Such a hardware infrastructure must be complemented with a new or updated software infrastructure to achieve greater results. In particular, great performance and speed-to-results benefits can be realized by modifying and optimizing the algorithms used for research to take full advantage of the features and enhancements incorporated into the latest generation of Intel Scalable Systems Framework.

Finding the right solution

Certainly, such HPC requirements and goals have been common for years in academic computing centers around the world. However, two things have changed recently. One is the volume of data that needs to be analyzed. And the second, and perhaps most important change, is the need to provide access to HPC resources to a much larger and broader group of researchers.

To that point, a new researcher demographic of non-computational experts has emerged. To meet the need of this demographic, the University needed a platform that would enable non-IT specialist researchers to benefit from HPC capabilities, while still handling large scale data intensive workloads. To meet the demand, the university partnered with Dell EMC and Intel to design and implement a new paradigm of HPC Systems.

For more than six years, Dell EMC and the University of Cambridge worked together on the HPC Solution Centre in an effort to provide solutions to real-world problems by increasing the effectiveness of the HPC and data platforms used in the research community. More recently, the effort expanded. To enable the community to take further advantage of new research discoveries, the university and Dell EMC were joined by Intel to create an additional focus on large scale data centric HPC, data analytics and multi-tenanted cloud HPC provisioning.

“The three-way collaboration has strengthened the HPC [center],” said Paul Calleja, head of HPC services, University of Cambridge. “By creating a larger mass of skills and resources, we are able to focus on the emerging problems of data-centric HPC, data analytics, and cloud based research computing services. We’re able to tackle the HPC challenges identified by the community and resolve real-world issues.”

As a result of this collaboration, innovation has been unlocked enabling new levels of performance, scale, cost efficiency, and ways of working within the commodity HPC and storage domains. For example, researchers benefit from the Intel Scalable Systems Framework with Dell EMC PowerEdge servers that use the full Intel portfolio of products, like Intel® Xeon® processors, Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessors, Intel SSDs; scalable Dell EMC HPC Lustre storage, plus interconnect solutions like Intel® True Scale Fabric; and Dell EMC Networking H-series switches based on Intel Omni-Path architecture. These advances have been applied across hundreds of customer use cases, driving advances in healthcare, high energy physics, astronomy and industry.

Through the enhanced performance of Dell EMC HPC solutions and access to the benefits of OpenStack virtualized technologies, university researchers are now able to process and model complex data with significantly improved flexibility and system usability.

Focus on computational biology

With the superior hardware and core technologies, the Dell EMC | Cambridge HPC Solution Centre platform radically democratizes access to large scale compute and data resources and ultimately contributes to significant advancements in the treatment discovery process.

A good example of what is being achieved is the work done by university researchers in the area of computational biology. Efforts in this area at the university focus on the development of new advanced computing solutions that use the most modern HPC and big data technologies to improve genomic data analysis and visualization.

To that point, there is great interest in developing new algorithms and bioinformatic tools for the analysis of genomic data that enable researchers to understand what biological processes, genes, or variants are involved in different phenotypes or diseases.

One effort being carried out is the work with Genomics England. Genomics England is a company set up and owned by the UK Department of Health to run the 100,000 Genomes Project, which aims to sequence 100,000 genomes from NHS patients with a rare disease and their families, and patients with cancer.

To help support the goals of the project and others like it, the Dell EMC | Cambridge HPC Solution Centre is developing a next-generation population platform that will take large amounts of genomics data let researchers look for biological relevance within that data for identifying the cause and treatments of the different diseases.

Overall, the Centre is exploring ways to make HPC capabilities available to a much larger set of researchers than was possible in the past. To achieve this goal, requires an innovative, flexible, scalable, and highly efficient HPC infrastructure. To that end, by working with Dell EMC and Intel, the HPC Solution Centre has made significant contributions to HPC system management, storage architecture, remote visualization, and green computing. This in turn has provided a way for university research staff to create new health care developments and unlock new insights in high energy physics and astronomy.

 

For more information about the Dell EMC | Cambridge HPC Solution Centre, visit http://www.dell.com/learn/uk/en/ukbsdt1/hpcc/cambridge-hpc-solution-centre

For more information about accelerating life sciences research with new HPC platforms, visit www.dell.com/hpc

For more information on Code Modernization with the Life Sciences Community, visit www.intel.com/healthcare/optimizecode