Vilnius University introduces a new era of scientific investigations in Lithuania with a ten-fold boost in processing power from new high performance computing cluster from Dell Technologies.

Analyzing medical images that contains millions of cells. Training neural networks and artificial intelligence applications. Developing sophisticated cyber security applications. It’s all in a day’s work for a new high performance computing system at Vilnius University in Lithuania.

The HPC cluster solution, delivered by Dell Technologies and local partner BAIP (now Novian Technologies) provides a full stack of carefully selected hardware technologies, including Dell EMC PowerEdge C6420 servers, more than 750 TB of storage, 1,728 computing cores from Intel, and more than 13TB of RAM, according to Novian Technologies.[1]

Novian estimates that the total calculated computational efficiency of this HPC cluster will reach 361 TeraFLOP/s (floating-point operations per second) DP (dual precision) and 4 PetaFLOP/s computational efficiencies in the field of deep learning — for a big increase in computational performance over the University’s current cluster.

This is the first time that Dell EMC PowerEdge C6420 servers have been installed within Lithuania’s scientific community. With four nodes in a 2U form factor and 2nd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, the PowerEdge C6420 servers are purpose-built for high performance hyperscale workloads, where performance and density go hand in hand.

The University chose the Dell Technologies HPC cluster because it would be simple to manage, could support the faculty for at least eight years and could be easily expanded if needed. And with ten times the processing power of an earlier-generation system, the HPC cluster can run a wide range of teaching and research applications that might not be possible on a lesser system.

The HPC stack means the faculty will be able to open up access to the rest of the university as well as commercial businesses, helping to build a research ecosystem around the University, according to Povilas Treigys, vice dean for information technologies for the Vilnius University’s Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics.

“The Dell Technologies HPC stack will extend our scientific community around the university and could even open up new revenue streams,” Treigys says in a new Dell Technologies case study. “We can share resources and widen areas of research as well as prove our capabilities globally.”

The new HPC stack will also help attract academics, researchers and students who want to work with the most powerful and up-to-date technologies.

“This is a new era of computational and experimental investigations at the university,” Treigys says. “Researchers and students will have access to HPC . . . [and] what can be achieved by employing this kind of technology in the future.”

The compute-hungry processing applications that will run on the HPC stack include neural networks, artificial intelligence, cyber security and medical research. Among many other uses, the cluster will be particularly beneficial for data- and compute-intensive cancer research programs.

“Together with partners, we have to analyze medical images that contain millions of cells, which we then have to count and classify,” Treigys explains. “Up until now, we didn’t have the resources for all that storage and analysis.”

For a look at Vilnius University, which is one of the oldest higher education institutions in Eastern and Central Europe, read the case study. Visit About VU and learn more about high performance computing solutions for research environments at delltechnologies.com/hpc.

[1] Novian Technologies, “Novian Technologies is implementing a unique cluster of high-performance computing devices at Vilnius University,” accessed March 17, 2021.