Cardiff University’s Advanced Research Computing@Cardiff (ARCCA) service has deployed 90 Lenovo ThinkSystem servers with Logicalis technology to improve the performance of its Hawk HPC cluster.
The Lenovo HPC hardware used in the Hawk cluster is powered by AMD Epyc 7443 processors with simultaneous multi-threading and cloud-native Ubiquity software.
The HPC cluster will be used to support research into the origins of the universe and star formation and has been split between two groups at Cardiff University. The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) Scientific Collaboration was given 75 Lenovo ThinkSystem SR645 servers to support its work into the detection of gravitational waves, ripples in space-time created by collisions between black holes.
A second research group focused on the study of star formation is using 15 Lenovo ThinkSystem SR630 servers for storage. Led by Royal Society University research fellow, Dr. Ana Duarte Cabral, the project looks into the creation of stars in spiral galaxies and requires what the university describes as “computationally demanding” simulations of galaxies, such as the Milky Way.
According to the university, the newly deployed servers have improved initial performance benchmarks by 46 percent, with the compute performance now available to researchers seeing a 100 percent increase.
“The LIGO project is a prime example of how supercomputing can broaden humanity’s understanding, and Lenovo is proud to be involved in this globally important research, enabling scientists to share their discoveries faster,” said Ian Jeffs, general country manager, UK&I, at Lenovo.
“Supported by Lenovo ThinkSystem technology, ARCCA can now deliver even more computing power to fuel hugely important projects such as LIGO and the Royal Society’s star formation study, as well as research across a wide range of other scientific fields.”
In addition to its provision of servers to Cardiff University, Lenovo has also collaborated with Intel to provide University College London with a more sustainable HPC cluster.
Built using Lenovo ThinkSystem servers in conjunction with the company’s Neptune liquid cooling technology and Intel’s High Bandwidth (HBM) memory, the cluster makes Imperial College one of the largest Tier 3 HPC universities in the UK.
