June 17 — Northumbria University, working in partnership with BIOS IT have become one of the first UK sites to deploy Intel Omni-Path Architecture (Intel OPA) for their centralised HPC infrastructure. This is the first stage of Northumbria University’s long term objective to provide its students, researchers and faculty members with a state of the art multipurpose heterogeneous computing facility.

Northumbria’s HPC cluster uses compute node building blocks configured with the Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v4 which provides a significant performance increase over previous- generation processors. The nodes are also configured with Intel OPA fabric, which provides 100Gb/s bandwidth per port alongside sub 1sec latency to ensure applications run at their optimal levels. The combination of all these technologies alongside the tuning from BIOS-IT engineers has resulted in servers providing in excess of 1Tflop/s (1×10^12 floating point operations per second) performance per node as measured with the industry standard Linpack benchmark.

BIOS IT conducted benchmarking across the most commonly used HPC applications and underwent performance / costs analysis across various permutations of HPC solutions available. In the end, OPA was selected based on variety of factors including, among others, performance and cost benefits.

BIOS-IT are also providing a Remote Cluster Administration service which means the Northumbria team can focus on on-boarding new users and ensuring an excellent HPC user experience.

“BIOS IT were proud to be presented with the opportunity to introduce Intel Omni-Path Architecture to Northumbria University. We pride ourselves on introducing first to market technologies to our customers, and with Northumbria’s vision of having a state of the art HPC system we felt that they would be a natural paring with Intel’s OPA,” said Ian Mellett, General Manager at BIOS IT.

“Intel Omni-Path Architecture and Intel Scalable System Framework provide organizations like Northumbria University with the performance they need for tomorrow’s HPC workloads, and the ability to scale to tens of thousands of nodes at a price competitive with today’s technologies,” said Barry Davis, general manager, HPC Compute & Networking, Data Center Group, Intel. “The selection of Intel Omni-Path Architecture as part of its latest HPC deployment will help the University of Northumbria move data faster to address their HPC needs now and into the future. We look forward to continuing our collaboration with BIOS IT as a provider of Intel Scalable System Framework.”

Northumbria University, Newcastle, is a research-rich, business-focused, professional university with a global reputation for academic excellence and creativity. We are one of the UK’s Top 50 universities according to the Guardian League Tables 2017, with 34,000 students from 131 countries. We are also ranked top 20 in the UK for student experience in the Times Higher Education Student Experience Survey 2015-16. We produce global graduates who are changing the world and boast an illustrious alumni list including Sir Jonathan Ive (Chief Design Officer, Apple). We are ranked 7th in the UK for the number of graduates in professional employment on permanent contracts, with 94% of students in work or further study six months after graduation, according to the latest figures from the Higher Education Statistical Agency (Destinations of Leavers from Higher Education).

Northumbria University, Newcastle, Associate Professor James McLaughlin, Engineering and Environment, reports: “Cutting-edge science combined with cutting-edge technology is what Northumbria University is all about. We are delighted to be working with BIOS-IT to deploy the latest Intel Xeon E5-2600 v4 processors and Omni-Path architecture. This will allow us to perform computations that have never been done before, undertake data intensive science more efficiently, as well as further strengthen our STEM undergraduate degrees.”

As a specific example of what can now be achieved, Dr. Leanne Wake, from the University’s Geography department, adds: “The installation of the HPC cluster at Northumbria will enable researchers in the Geography department to efficiently perform multiple high-resolution simulations of Earth systems thus allowing us to explore more deeply the interactions between the cryosphere and climate over a range of temporal and spatial scales. Additionally, the multi-user capacity of the cluster allows a unique opportunity for undergraduates on the Geography course to add a more computational dimension to their degree.”

About BIOS IT

BIOS IT is a global IT consultancy and solution provider, focused on delivering the latest high-performance, power efficient IT solutions. From liquid-cooled servers to fully bespoke solutions tailored to meet your exact requirements, BIOS IT provides the right solution for you. Working with industry leading ecosystem partners in both hardware and software vendors from across the industry, BIOS IT is positioned to design and create the most innovative solutions optimized for speed and efficiency that provides you with that imperative edge over the competition.

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Source: BIOS IT