Hewlett Packard Enterprise today announced it has built a sixth generation HPC cluster, Iridis 6, for the University of Southampton. The new system expands existing resources of the 0.86 Pflops Iridis 5 supercomputer for research in such areas such as genomics, aerodynamics, and renewable batteries.
HPE said the new system delivers four times the performance at 70 percent of the power consumption of the Iridis 5.
The cluster was built using HPE ProLiant Gen11 servers powered by 4th Generation AMD EPYC processors for computational science at scale requiring modelling and simulation. In addition, the university leveraged HPE Services for onsite support in building, testing, and deploying Iridis 6 to optimize workloads to efficiently process compute and data-intensive research.
“Throughout the past year, we’ve seen an increased demand for HPC capabilities, with our exceptional community of over 24,000 students and researchers, driven by a growth in AI research cases and numbers of joint projects with local and regional businesses,” said Chris Yorke, Associate Director Research IT, University of Southampton. “At the same time, we are very conscious of the fact that our HPC systems are responsible for a significant part of our energy consumption. To align with our sustainability strategy for Iridis 6, we required a system that would deliver exponentially higher performance at a lower power consumption – and HPE’s expertise in building energy-efficient HPC systems was crucial in achieving this. With the HPE ProLiant servers, we found a solution that provides four times the performance, needing only 70 percent of the power compared to the system it replaces.”
University of Southampton
The university is a founding member of the Russell Group of 24 UK research instituions, with Southampton providing HPC resources to public and commercial sectors, along with consultancy and research services to UK businesses. Southampton views high-performance computing as a strategic enabler of its research, HPE said, driving key projects of international scale, such as the effects of large constellations and satellites in space, and other innovations.
“Investing in state-of-the-art high performance computing infrastructure is crucial to ensure that the UK’s prized scientific and research communities have the tools they need to be globally competitive,” said Matt Harris, senior vice president and managing director, UK, Ireland, Middle East and Africa at HPE. “The University of Southampton‘s major investment in Iridis 6 will support the next wave of scientific breakthroughs. We are proud to be helping the University accelerate research and innovation that will contribute to growing the science and technology ecosystem in the UK.”
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