Dell Technologies Interview: How Cambridge University Pushed the Wilkes3 Supercomputer to No. 4 on the Green500

[SPONSORED CONTENT]  In this interview conducted on behalf of Dell Technologies, insideHPC spoke with Dr. Paul Calleja, director of Research Computing Services at the University of Cambridge, about the Wilkes3 supercomputer, currently ranked no. 4 on the Green500 list of the world’ most energy efficient supercomputers. Dr. Calleja discusses how he and his team developed an low-power strategy for the 80-node Wilkes3 system by the adoption of GPUs and lower clock speeds balanced against high throughput. He also explains how the Dell PowerEdge XE8545 -based cluster, which utilizes AMD EPYC CPUs and the Mellanox InfiniBand interconnect, fits within the university’s larger, heterogeneous Cumulus system, comprised of 2,500 Intel x86 servers.

Introducing the Cambridge Data Accelerator

In this video from the Dell EMC HPC Community meeting, Alisdair King from Cambridge University describes the new Cambridge Data Accelerator. “The Cambridge Data Accelerator is an open source software package for building Burst Buffers from high speed flash storage. With available support from Cambridge University, the Cambridge Data Accelerator offers flexibility and high performance for high performance workloads.”

Will the Cloud steal my job?

In this special guest feature, Dr Rosemary Francis from Ellexus describes why the HPC Community has little to fear from the rise of Cloud Computing. “AWS alone has eight different types of storage that vary hugely in terms of storage size, bandwidth, peak performance and other more complex metrics. It’s not a ‘one set-up’ solution. If you’ve spent time optimizing your on-prem cluster for each different run or set of user expectations, you’re just going to have to do the same in the cloud.”

Faster Route to Insights with Hardware and Visualization Advances from Intel

An eye-popping visualization of two black holes colliding demonstrates 3D Adaptive Mesh Refinement volume rendering on next-generation Intel® Xeon Phi™ processors. “It simplifies things when you can run on a single processor and not have to offload the visualization work,” says Juha Jäykkä, system manager of the COSMOS supercomputer. Dr. Jäykkä holds a doctorate in theoretical physics and also serves as a scientific consultant to the system’s users. “Programming is easier. The Intel Xeon Phi processor architecture is the next step for getting more performance and more power efficiency, and it is refreshingly convenient to use.”