Dell HPC helps University of Cambridge see the edge of the universe

Dell says that the University of Cambridge (UoC) has expanded on their partnership to help build the UK’s fastest academic supercomputer. This high-performance computing (HPC) cluster has been developed to provide energy efficient support to construct the world’s largest radio telescope, the Square Kilometer Array (SKA).
Powering the Future of Space Exploration

The SKA project will be the result of a multinational collaboration to build a telescope housing the world’s largest streaming data processor. With a projected completion date of 2018, this technology will allow scientists to survey the sky more than ten thousand times faster than ever before and map a billion galaxies out to the edge of the Universe. UoC was selected, in partnership with the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), to drive the system development, placing it at the forefront of large scale big-data science. To support this, however, it needed a fast, energy-efficient supercomputer to handle the research required for its new role.
UoC selected Dell, in partnership with NVIDIA and Mellanox, to provide a specially designed, highly powerful HPC to power the SKA project. Paul Calleja, Director of HPC Service at University of Cambridge, explained the choice: “Dell’s Fresh Air Cooling was an ideal fit for our needs. We needed to create the most efficient supercomputer in the world in order to back the prestige of the SKA project and we couldn’t do that with energy draining technology. Dell’s server solutions let us increase compute power while decreasing our energy expenditure.”

Richard Rawcliffe, Director, Public Sector, Dell UK, stated: “It is incredibly exciting to see what UoC are doing with the SKA project and how this HPC supported research will contribute to a greater understanding of our universe. By working with the UoC to develop a custom solution, we are helping them drive faster processing and increasing energy efficiency, so they get the computational power they need to deliver their important research.”

Saving Energy Here on Earth
UoC deployed 128 Dell PowerEdge T620 servers to produce an exceptionally high computational performance of 240TF. The PowerEdge T620 servers are ideal for versatility, scalability and performance – all key qualities required to support a significant global project. The system is also the most energy efficient, air-cooled supercomputer in the world, coming second in the global Green500 ranking and delivering an extremely high performance rate per watt.

With Dell’s help, the UoC HPC data centre has become one of the most efficient in the world – producing an overall energy efficiency increase of 150%. For a project such as SKA, this factor is crucial to ensuring that, on completion, the immensely powerful telescope will be able to handle the masses of data it will collect over time.
As one of only two academic HPC centres in the UK to have multiple HPC systems in place, the University of Cambridge will now be able to use its capabilities to drive future prominent research projects to increase its global recognition.