HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING


New supercomputer aims to simplify use of HPC


ROBERT ROE TALKS TO SOUTHAMPTON UNIVERSITY’S OZ PARCHMENT ABOUT THE DECISION-MAKING BEHIND INSTALLING THE LATEST HPC SYSTEM AT THE UNIVERSITY


With a 425 per cent increase in the number of research projects in the past 10 years, the staff


running the HPC facility at the university at Southampton choose to simplify the node architecture to better serve a growing community of both new and experienced HPC users. Researchers from across the University of Southampton can now benefit from a new high performance computing (HPC) machine named Iridis 5. The new 1,300 Teraflop system was designed, integrated and configured by high performance compute, storage and data analytics integrator, OCF, and will support research demanding traditional HPC as well as projects requiring large scale deep storage, big data analytics, web platforms for bioinformatics, and AI services. ‘Iridis 4 was based On Sandy Bridge and the current one we have got now is based on Sky Lake so you can see we have jumped four generations of development. Four years is a long time in HPC performance,’ stated Oz Parchment, director of i-solutions at the University of Southampton. ‘We are quite packed in terms of our


users so were running pretty much constantly above 90 per cent utilisation. For us having a bigger system is about


20 Scientific Computing World April/May 2018


improving the throughput for our community’ Parchment added. The new system Iridis 5 – four times


more powerful than the University’s previous HPC system – is comprised of more than 20,000 Intel Skylake cores on a next generation Lenovo ThinkSystem SD530 server – the first UK installation of the hardware. In addition to the CPUs, it is using 10 Gigabyte servers containing 40 NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti GPUs for projects that require high, single precision performance, and OCF has committed to the delivery of 20 Volta GPUs when they become available. OCF’s xCAT-based software is used to manage the main HPC resources, with Bright Computing’s Advanced Linux Cluster Management software providing the research cloud and data analytics portions of the system. ‘In this case there are really two main


drivers for the new system. One is just the general growth of computer modelling in science and engineering, our business schools, economics department, geography and psychology users are all experiencing growth in the use of


“We’ve had early access to Iridis 5 and it’s substantially bigger and faster than its previous iteration – it’s well ahead of any other in use at any University across the UK for the types of calculations we’re doing”


computational tools and computational modelling’ said Parchment. ‘The complexity of these models means that the only way to solve them is on large scale supercomputers and so we not only have the traditional users, engineers, physicists, chemists but now we have a new generation of researchers from biology and these other areas that are looking at using large scale systems’ added Parchment. Syma Khalid, professor of


computational biophysics at the University of Southampton, stated: ‘Our research focuses on understanding how biological membranes function – we use HPC to develop models to predict how membranes protect bacteria. The new insights we gain from our HPC studies have the potential to inform the development of novel antibiotics. We’ve had early access to Iridis 5 and it’s substantially bigger and faster than its previous iteration – it’s well ahead of any other in use at any university across the UK for the types of calculations we’re doing.’


Managing diversity With this increasingly broad and diverse portfolio of users Parchment and his colleagues must not only provide computing services but also try to teach users about the best way to access and derive value from the HPC system. ‘Even with the traditional usage model


we get about 30 new projects starting every month and there will be a small proportion of experienced users and a larger proportion of undergraduates transitioning to post-graduate studies and they might never have touched a supercomputer before,’ said Parchment.


@scwmagazine | www.scientific-computing.com


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