Today Northumbria University announced that its has become one of the first UK sites to deploy Intel Omni-Path Architecture (Intel OPA) for their centralized HPC infrastructure. Deployed by BIOS IT, this is the first stage of Northumbria University’s long term objective to provide its students, researchers and faculty members with a state of the art multipurpose heterogeneous computing facility.
Intel Omni-Path Architecture and Intel Scalable System Framework provide organizations like Northumbria University with the performance they need for tomorrow’s HPC workloads, and the ability to scale to tens of thousands of nodes at a price competitive with today’s technologies,” said Barry Davis, general manager, HPC Compute & Networking, Data Center Group, Intel. “The selection of Intel Omni-Path Architecture as part of its latest HPC deployment will help the University of Northumbria move data faster to address their HPC needs now and into the future. We look forward to continuing our collaboration with BIOS IT as a provider of Intel Scalable System Framework.”
Northumbria’s HPC cluster uses compute node building blocks configured with the Intel Xeon Pprocessor E5-2600 v4 which provides a significant performance increase over previous- generation processors. The nodes are also configured with Intel OPA fabric, which provides 100Gb/s bandwidth per port alongside sub-microsecond latency to ensure applications run at their optimal levels
BIOS IT conducted benchmarking across the most commonly used HPC applications and underwent performance / costs analysis across various permutations of HPC solutions available. In the end, OPA was selected based on variety of factors including, among others, performance and cost benefits.
BIOS-IT are also providing a Remote Cluster Administration service which means the Northumbria team can focus on on-boarding new users and ensuring an excellent HPC user experience.
BIOS IT were proud to be presented with the opportunity to introduce Intel Omni-Path Architecture to Northumbria University,” said Ian Mellett, General Manager at BIOS IT. “We pride ourselves on introducing first to market technologies to our customers, and with Northumbria’s vision of having a state of the art HPC system we felt that they would be a natural paring with Intel’s OPA.”
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