University HPC as easy as three company solution

Dell EMC and Alces Flight with AWS to create HPC solution for the University of Liverpool.

  • Thursday, 7th December 2017 Posted 6 years ago in by Phil Alsop
Built by Dell EMC and Alces Flight the solution will use AWS to provide students and researchers a greater depth of flexibility in research by combining on-premises and cloud resources into a hybrid HPC solution.

“We are pleased to be working with Dell EMC and Alces Flight on this new venture,” said Cliff Addison, Head of Advanced Research Computing at the University of Liverpool, “The University of Liverpool has always maintained cutting edge technology and by architecting flexible access to computational resources on AWS we’re setting the bar even higher for what can be achieved in HPC.”
“Universities are competing in an increasingly demanding environment and the need to differentiate and offer a best in class experience is vital. The collaboration between ourselves and Alces Flight helps the University of Liverpool offer a significant computing resource to their students and faculty,” said Peter Barnes,VP Infrastructure Solutions Group, Dell EMC UK and Ireland, “Our Dell PowerEdge 14G servers provide the highly scalable compute platform that is instrumental in this. High Performance Computing is already being used around the world to make significant scientific breakthroughs and today’s launch will hopefully be the catalyst for more.”
“AWS is making High Performance Computing (HPC) more accessible and more scalable than ever before,” said Brendan Bouffler, Global Research Computing at Amazon Web Services. “Using AWS, scientists at Liverpool University will have instant access to facilities most of their peers at other institutions stand in a queue for and that means a much faster turn-around between experiments, speeding up their time to the next exciting discovery. It’s humbling to see what this community is able to achieve when traditional constraints of IT are removed.”
“We want researchers and students at the University of Liverpool to be able to run HPC workloads anywhere, and at any time,” said Wil Mayers, Technical Director of Alces Flight, “By being able to provide a unified HPC environment that incorporates both Dell EMC on-premises hardware and AWS, we can provide users with a high-quality, consistent experience. Our hope is that this results in further collaborative engagements that push hybrid HPC forward, allowing users to have quick access to some of the best hardware and cloud resources available.”
The collaborative solution from Dell EMC and Alces Flight on AWS is the first of its kind for the University of Liverpool.  A fully managed on-premises HPC cluster and cloud based HPC account have been architected for students and researchers to achieve access to the computational resources required with as little delay as possible.