CHICAGO, Nov. 14, 2017 — Univa, a leading innovator of workload management products, today announced its Univa Grid Engine distributed resource management system is powering the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics’ (WHG) high performance computing (HPC) environment.

WHG is a research institute within the Nuffield Department of Medicine at the University of Oxford. The Centre is an international leader in genetics, genomics, statistics and structural biology with more than 400 researchers and 70 administrative and support personnel. WHG’s mission is to advance the understanding of genetically-related conditions through a broad range of multi-disciplinary research.

To support its research community, the Centre operates a shared HPC cluster comprising over 4,000 InfiniBand-connected, high-memory compute cores and 4PB of high performance, parallel storage running 250 applications. WHG’s previous open source scheduler lacked practical software support and did not address the increasing use of containerized machine learning applications. To plan for growth and accommodate mixed workload types (serial-batch, array, MPI, container, Spark) on the same shared cluster, the Centre evaluated a variety of open source and commercial options. The review committee awarded Univa Grid Engine as the replacement, citing its modern scheduler, expert technical support and minimal user re-training for its selection.

“The conversion from the previous scheduler to Univa Grid Engine was virtually painless. Our users are happy that their hard-won knowledge continues to be relevant, significant scheduler bugs and vulnerabilities were fixed, and we also save on our own precious system administration time,” said Dr. Robert Esnouf, Head of Research Computing Core, Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics. “We can now plan for significant future growth with Univa as a key component of our infrastructure offering.”

The transition to Univa Grid Engine also provided WHG with new capabilities like GPU-aware scheduling, DRMAA2, and container support, placing WHG in a position to embrace emerging research techniques and support a wider range of research. To learn more how WHG expanded workloads for their life-science research, download this detailed case study.

About Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics

The Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics is a large interdisciplinary research centre comprising 400 scientists in 45 research groups, within the University of Oxford. It is one of the leading institutes, globally, in human genetics. Since its founding 21 years ago, the WHG has played a pioneering role in the progress and success of human disease genetics. The Centre’s focus is the development and implementation of novel approaches to exploit human genetics and uncover disease biology so as to improve healthcare.

About Univa Corporation

Univa is the largest independent provider of workload management products that optimize performance of applications, services and containers. Univa enables enterprises to modernize their scaled compute resources and run mixed workloads across on-premise, cloud, and hybrid infrastructures. Over 2 million computer cores are currently managed by Univa products in industries such as life sciences, manufacturing, oil and gas, transportation and financial services. Univa is headquartered in Chicago, with offices in Canada and Germany. For more information, please visit www.univa.com.

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Source: Univa Corporation