COMPUTING & IT RESOURCES
Why HPC and supercomputing are driving the future of research
IAN JEFFS, UK&I General Manager at Lenovo Infrastructure Solutions Group, tells Education Today how high-performance computing (HPC) is accelerating the latest research, detailing Lenovo’s partnership with Northumbria University.
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nderstanding the melting of the vast Antarctic ice sheets is among the most vital scientific research on our planet, and high-performance computing is key to understanding how it could impact sea levels in the coming century. Large scale simulations like the ones used to model and understand ice sheet melting, cannot run on ordinary computers, and require high-performance computing (HPC).
High-performance computing refers to clusters of components which can calculate and process data far faster than ordinary computers (supercomputers are a subset of high-performance computing, referring to extremely powerful purpose-built machines). In research institutions across Europe, HPC and supercomputing, often paired with artificial intelligence (AI), are becoming increasingly crucial to research on everything from microbes to analysing the output of space telescopes.
High-performance computing is already accelerating research at institutions across Europe and around the world. Northumbria University’s new Higgs cluster (named after the pioneering British physicist Peter Higgs who proposed the Higgs boson) is now powering projects aiming to understand not only the melting of Antarctica’s ice, but also how to maintain Earth’s satellite fleets. HPC systems are powering simulations of the whole Earth system at institutions such as Italy’s Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (CMCC), where its ‘Cassandra’ supercomputer will also be used to drive AI-based climate change predictions. In Germany’s University of Paderborn, an
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www.education-today.co.uk April 2025
HPC system will be available for nation-wide research, with research including simulations of how atoms interact.
Unravelling the secrets of DNA
Northumbria University’s NU-OMICS lab specialises in analysing DNA sequencing information. During the pandemic, the lab was analysing 5,000 Sars-CoV-2 genome sequencing samples a week, more data than many nation states. But the University’s previous HPC cluster struggled to keep up, with bottlenecks in the system meaning that jobs that should have taken 30 minutes took 90 minutes, and
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