In this video, Cliff Brereton describes how new supercomputing resources from Lenovo enable the Hartree Centre to help industry innovate in the UK.
“STFC Hartree Centre needed a powerful, flexible server system that could drive research in energy efficiency as well as economic impact for its clients. By extending its System x platform with NeXtScale System, Hartree Centre can now move to exascale computing, support sustainable energy use and help its clients gain a competitive advantage.”
To provide high-performance computing capabilities for its clients, the Hartree Centre requires advanced compute solutions, massive capacity for big data and broad system flexibility. Five petabytes of disk storage and 15 petabytes of tape storage, underpinned by IBM Spectrum Scale for high-performance file management, make this one of the largest data centers in the UK.
As Brereton explains, however: “It’s not just a challenge of storing data, but of the information we can get from it—which gives us a more valuable output, and our clients a better product by design.” Cliff Brereton, adds, “One of the key issues is bringing big data and compute together.”
Working with advanced computational programs at UK universities, the Hartree Centre has positioned itself as a leader in this combination of big-data analytics and high-performance computing. The center has also taken steps toward addressing related issues of energy use that increasingly accompany high-performance computing. “When we look to move these systems from petascale to exascale, which we expect to reach probably within the next five to eight years, current architectures are no longer sustainable,” says Brereton. “We’re going to be developing software models that bring down that scaling quite considerably.”
