SEATTLE & JOHANNESBURG--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in South Africa, Cambridge University, Eclipse Holdings and Dell announced a partnership to expand access to research computing solutions and expertise, enabling researchers to drive innovations focused on some of the world’s most challenging issues prevalent to the region. Drought and climate change as well as HIV and malaria are just some of the issues they plan to address by leveraging the most powerful, high performance computing cluster in Africa.
The data center will be used for research rendering by all academic and research institutions worldwide, with a particular focus on earth science, including climate change and its impact on Africa’s agriculture. Previously, researchers in Africa borrowed or purchased compute time from institutions throughout the world to conduct their studies. Now they are able to conduct research with the continent’s specific needs as a priority. The new high performance computing cluster, built in collaboration with researchers at Dell/Cambridge University HPC Solution Centre, features 260 Dell PowerEdge C servers as well as Infiniband switches and services provided by Dell. The solution was installed and integrated by Cambridge University and Eclipse Holdings in a record three weeks – one of the fastest installations of its kind.
Researchers around the world driving innovation
As part of its commitment to foster ground breaking research, Dell continues to provide cost-effective, readily accessible research computing solutions and services to researchers around the world. Designed to meet “real life” issues, Dell’s innovative technologies are enabling researchers to solve a number of challenges:
- Through its Powering the Possible program for pediatric cancer, Dell is providing the secure cloud-based IT infrastructure to support the world’s first personalized medicine clinical trial for pediatric cancer conducted by the Neuroblastoma and Medullobastoma Translational Research Consortium (NMTRC) and supported by The Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen). Scientists and physicians will use the donated cloud – which is both a high-performance computing resource and data exchange/collaboration resource – to investigate new technologies that accelerate genetic analysis and identification of targeted treatments for each patient from months to days.
- Researchers as part of University of Wisconsin-Madison’s IceCube project at the South Pole leverage a server cluster to reconstruct raw data in order to determine which data should be transmitted by limited-bandwidth satellite to Madison for further study of mysteries, such as dark matter.
- Speed and performance in cars can be improved from high performance computing as Formula One teams, including Team Lotus, are able to innovate and find new ways to maximize down force while minimizing drag resulting in getting to speeds of up to 220 mph.
Dell at Super Computing Conference
Many of the researchers and others are available at SC11, the premier international conference for the supercomputing community. In addition, Dell is showcasing its latest innovations in GPU, storage, visualization and workstation supercomputing solutions at booth #2040.
Quotes
“Africa has genuine problems that can only be solved with the aid of high performance research computing resources,” said Dr. Happy Sithole, director, Center of High Performance Cluster Computing (CHPC) in South Africa. “It is time that Africa had access to this kind of technology and, by partnering with Dell, we have been able to overcome the traditional barriers of entry in our launch of a supercomputing solution. This HPC solution will be a central resource from which researchers across many disciplines in Africa can benefit, to the advantage of everyone in Africa.”
“We are privileged to have both the skill and the experience which proudly allows us to continue our existing business relationship with the CSIR’s national High Performance Computing facility,” said Nico Meintjes, chief executive officer, Eclipse Holdings. “It was however Dell’s ’can and will do‘ commitment to the project as well as our HPC partnership with Cambridge University that made us break all records in installing and integrating the CSIR’s HPC infrastructure in three weeks – from date of order to successful LINPAC testing. This has to my knowledge, never been done before.”
“When data is managed and leveraged through the increased accessibility and affordability of research computing, we see life changing results,” said Paul Bell, president of Public and Large Enterprise, Dell. “We have already seen how the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research team is achieving this with their research and how they are using technology to drive innovation.”
About Dell
Dell Inc. (NASDAQ: DELL) listens to customers and delivers innovative technology and services that give them the power to do more. For more information, visit www.dell.com.
About the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research
The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in South Africa is one of the leading scientific and technology research, development and implementation organisations in Africa. It undertakes directed research and development for socio-economic growth. For more information, visit: http://www.csir.co.za/.
About Eclipse Holdings
Eclipse Holdings is an Integrator and enterprise data center solutions Service Provider with specialization in high performance computing, VLDB storage platforms, and Infiniband network connectivity.