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HPE teams up with industry and academia to launch supercomputing project

The project will help British companies and universities tap into the benefits offered by supercomputers

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has teamed up with ARM, SUSE and three British universities to launch one of the UK's largest supercomputing projects.

The companies will build and deploy one of the world's biggest ARM-based supercomputers, which will eventually be made available to both industry and academia.

Supported by the UK government's industrial strategy, the supercomputer will be used to build applications that can "drive economic growth and productivity" across the country.

Set to be built by HPE, the supercomputer will be installed at Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre (EPCC) at the University of Edinburgh, the University of Bristol and the University of Leicester.

Due to be completed by the summer, the project - known as Catalyst UK - has been commissioned to run for three years.

It is intended to help companies and educational institutions tap into the benefits offered by supercomputing technology.

This particular project will give companies the chance to generate "actionable insights" in a bid to streamline operations and boost revenues.

Tthe three supercomputer 'clusters' will run more than 12,000 Arm-based cores in total, hosted on HPE Apollo 70 HPC systems.

The clusters at each university will be largely identical, consisting of 64 HPE Apollo 70 systems, each equipped with two 32 core Cavium ThunderX2 processors, 128GB of memory composed of 16 DDR4 DIMMs with Mellanox InfiniBand interconnects.

The operating system will be SUSE Linux Enterprise Suerver for HPC. Each cluster is expected to occupy two computer racks and consume a total of approximately 30KW of power.

Science Minister Sam Gyimah MP said that the programme will accelerate "collaboration between the government and business" and help them make the most of supercomputing technology.

"Through our Modern Industrial Strategy, AI Grand Challenge and upcoming Sector Deal, the UK will lead the AI and data revolution," he claimed.

"Doing so has the potential to increase the UK's competitiveness in emerging industries around the world, grow our economy and create the high-value jobs we need to build a Britain fit for the future."

HPE said the main aim of the project is to "investigate and showcase the potential of ARM-based HPC installations" and "overcome the limitations of traditional computer architectures".

Mike Vildibill, vice president of advanced technologies group at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, added: "We are currently seeing an insatiable demand for compute performance, as companies seek to gain intelligent and actionable insights from their data.

"As we embark on the global race towards more powerful and eventually exascale systems, new approaches and technologies are needed to tackle some of the key challenges in achieving these levels of performance, such as rising energy consumption.

"HPE is excited to work with ARM, SUSE, and other key partners to offer the HPC community a fresh alternative for high performance computing which we believe will stimulate the industry to develop increasingly performant and efficient supercomputing solutions."

HPE teams up with industry and academia to launch supercomputing project

The project will help British companies and universities tap into the benefits offered by supercomputers

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