Over 1,000 researchers in areas such as paleobiology, earth science, biochemistry, mathematics, physics, molecular modelling, life sciences, and aerospace engineering will be taking advantage of the new system. BC4 is already aiding research into new medicines and drug absorption by the human body.
“We have researchers looking at whole-planet modelling with the aim of trying to understand the earth’s climate, climate change and how that’s going to evolve, as well as others looking at rotary blade design for helicopters, the mutation of genes, the spread of disease and where diseases come from,” said Dr Christopher Woods, EPSRC Research Software Engineer Fellow, University of Bristol. “Early benchmarking is showing that the new system is three times faster than our previous cluster – research that used to take a month now takes a week, and what took a week now only takes a few hours. That’s a massive improvement that’ll be a great benefit to research at the University.”
BC4 uses Lenovo NeXtScale compute nodes, each comprising of two 14 core 2.4 GHz Intel Broadwell CPUs with 128 GiB of RAM. It also includes 32 nodes of two NVIDIA Pascal P100 GPUs plus one GPU login node, designed into the rack by Lenovo’s engineering team to meet the specific requirements of the University.
Connecting the cluster are several high-speed networks, the fastest of which is a two-level Intel Omni-Path Architecture network running at 100Gb/s. BC4’s storage is composed of one PetaByte of disk provided by DDN's GS7k and IME systems running the parallel file system Spectrum Scale from IBM.
Effective benchmarking and optimisation, using the benchmarking capabilities of Lenovo’s HPC research centre in Stuttgart, the first of its kind, has ensured that BC4 is highly efficient in terms of physical footprint, while fully utilising the 30KW per rack energy limit. Lenovo’s commitment to third party integration has allowed the University to avoid vendor lock-in while permitting new hardware to be added easily between refresh cycles.
Dr Christopher Woods continues: “To help with the interactive use of the cluster, BC4 has a visualisation node equipped with NVIDIA Grid vGPUs so it helps our scientists to visualise the work they’re doing, so researchers can use the system even if they’ve not used an HPC machine before.”
Housed at VIRTUS’ LONDON4, the UK’s first shared data centre for research and education in Slough, BC4 is the first of the University’s supercomputers to be held at an independent facility. The system is directly connected to the Bristol campus via JISC's high speed Janet network. Kelly Scott, account director, education at VIRTUS Data Centres said, “LONDON4 is specifically designed to have the capacity to host ultra high density infrastructure and high performance computing platforms, so an ideal environment for systems like BC4. The University of Bristol is the 22nd organisation to join the JISC Shared Data Centre in our facility, which enables institutions to collaborate and share infrastructure resources to drive real innovation that advances meaningful research.”
Currently numbering in the hundreds, applications running on the University’s previous cluster will be replicated onto the new system, which will allow researchers to create more applications and better scaling software. Applications are able to be moved directly onto BC4 without the need for re-engineering.
“We’re now in our tenth year of using HPC in our facility. We’ve endeavored to make each phase of BlueCrystal bigger and better than the last, embracing new technology for the benefit of our users and researchers,” commented Caroline Gardiner, Academic Research Facilitator at the University of Bristol.
Simon Burbidge, Director of Advanced Computing comments: “It is with great excitement that I take on the role of Director of Advanced Computing at this time, and I look forward to enabling the University's ambitious research programmes through the provision of the latest computational techniques and simulations.”
