HPC YEARBOOK 2021/22
He continued: ‘Users can be limited in the number of simulations they can run or simulations simply taking too long to complete. This is simulation has been well-established for decades, but we are continuing to see smaller organisations and engineering teams realising its potential for the first time, an area where HPC can provide a platform to support engineering research and development.’ ‘In simple terms, an HPC cluster
combines a number of identical servers, a fast network, and some management tools to give a single pool of compute resources that can be shared across a number of users,’ said Dean. ‘Simulations can be submitted to a scheduler and run across multiple servers simultaneously, returning results quicker than could ever be possible on a single workstation.’ ‘By centralising resources amongst
a number of users, and using the scheduler to queue up jobs, the HPC cluster can be kept busy, so in addition to being able to deliver results quicker, can also offer much higher utilisation, and therefore simulation throughput, than an equivalent amount of compute capability spread across multiple users,’ Dean continued, ‘with the additional benefit that users’
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workstations are freed up and they can concentrate on other engineering work, rather than waiting around for jobs to finish.’ There is a perception that the
added complexity of HPC can make these systems hard to manage or even potentially beyond the reach of organisations that may currently be using high spec workstations for engineering simulation. However, integrators can assist in the management, maintenance and service quality of HPC system which vastly reduces the burden on the organisation. This allows a research centre for academic institutions the freedom to support its scientists’ use of computational resources without requiring a large investment in large numbers of staff to support the more technical aspects of running a HPC service.
‘While I won’t deny there is some
inherent complexity, this can be mitigated against - the key here is to work with the right partners and with the right technologies – there are software products out there that make adopting these technologies much easier and specialist integrators, like OCF, that take the pain out of designing, installing and managing these systems,’
stated Dean. ‘If manufacturers make HPC tightly integrated with their engineering simulation applications, it can be possible to make HPC just another tool for engineers. Selecting HPC systems can be as straightforward as choosing a printer making it easier to benefit from the capabilities HPC systems gives you: high utilisation and scale.’
‘By moving away from engineering simulation being performed on discrete workstations by engineers working in isolation, a HPC system can bring these single sources together, into one big, centralised pool – which results in each individual engineer having access to a much bigger resource,’ Dean concluded.
Dell bolsters the University of Pisa’s remote learning HPC integrators can also help to modernise and update existing architectures to support new types of research. In the case of The University of Pisa, Dell was able to support the use of a new storage architecture that helped the staff transition to remote learning while also supporting advanced research.
Maurizio Davini, CTO, University of Pisa, commented: ‘As we transitioned
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