BICESTER, UK, December 8, 2017 — Built by Dell EMC and Alces Flight, the solution will use Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide students and researchers a greater depth of flexibility in research by combining on-premises and cloud resources into a hybrid high performance computing (HPC) solution.

“We are pleased to be working with Dell EMC and Alces Flight on this new venture,” said Cliff Addison, head of Advanced Research Computing at the University of Liverpool. “The University of Liverpool has always maintained cutting-edge technology and by architecting flexible access to computational resources on AWS we’re setting the bar even higher for what can be achieved in HPC.”

“Universities are competing in an increasingly demanding environment and the need to differentiate and offer a best-in-class experience is vital. The collaboration between ourselves and Alces Flight helps the University of Liverpool offer a significant computing resource to their students and faculty,” said Peter Barnes, VP Infrastructure Solutions Group, Dell EMC UK and Ireland. “Our Dell PowerEdge 14G servers provide the highly scalable compute platform that is instrumental in this. High-Performance Computing is already being used around the world to make significant scientific breakthroughs and today’s launch will hopefully be the catalyst for more.”

“AWS is making High-Performance Computing (HPC) more accessible and more scalable than ever before,” said Brendan Bouffler, Global Research Computing at Amazon Web Services. “Using AWS, scientists at Liverpool University will have instant access to facilities most of their peers at other institutions stand in a queue for and that means a much faster turn-around between experiments, speeding up their time to the next exciting discovery. It’s humbling to see what this community is able to achieve when traditional constraints of IT are removed.”

“We want researchers and students at the University of Liverpool to be able to run HPC workloads anywhere and at any time,” said Wil Mayers, Technical Director of Alces Flight. “By being able to provide a unified HPC environment that incorporates both Dell EMC on-premises hardware and AWS, we can provide users with a high-quality, consistent experience. Our hope is that this results in further collaborative engagements that push hybrid HPC forward, allowing users to have quick access to some of the best hardware and cloud resources available.”

The collaborative solution from Dell EMC and Alces Flight on AWS is the first of its kind for the University of Liverpool. A fully managed on-premises HPC cluster and cloud-based HPC account have been architected for students and researchers to achieve access to the computational resources required with as little delay as possible.

About the University of Liverpool, Department of Computing Services

The University of Liverpool is one of the UK’s leading research institutions with an annual turnover of £480 million, including £102 million for research. Ranked in the top 1% of higher education institutions worldwide, Liverpool is a member of the prestigious Russell Group of the U.K.’s leading research universities.

About Dell EMC

Dell EMC, a part of Dell Technologies, enables organizations to modernize, automate and transform their data center using industry-leading converged infrastructure, servers, storage and data protection technologies. This provides a trusted foundation for businesses to transform IT, through the creation of a hybrid cloud, and transform their business through the creation of cloud-native applications and big data solutions. Dell EMC services customers across 180 countries – including 98 percent of the Fortune 500 – with the industry’s most comprehensive and innovative portfolio from edge to core to cloud.

About Alces Flight

Alces Flight is made up of a team of specialists in High Performance Computing (HPC) software for scientists, engineers and researchers. Based in the U.K., Alces designs, builds and supports environments to help users make efficient use of the compute and storage resources available to them. Our products are designed to support both existing users with software that is familiar to them and help first-time users to discover, learn and develop their HPC skills.

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Source: Alces Flight Limited