Dell EMC and the University of Cambridge (UoC) have today announced a new multi-million pound Bio-Medical Cloud service, one of the largest dedicated bio-medical compute and data platforms in UK university research. The capabilities offered by the platform will accelerate research and computational medicine allowing data analytical methods developed in the university setting to be used to improve patient outcomes in the clinic.
While the need for traditional HPC use cases still exists within medical research, a new researcher demographic of non-computational experts has emerged. To meet the need of this demographic, UoC needed a new platform which would enable non-IT specialised medical researchers to benefit from HPC capabilities, while still handling large scale data intensive workloads. To meet the demand, UoC partnered with Dell EMC and Intel to design and implement a new paradigm of HPC systems. Through the enhanced performance of Dell HPC hardware solutions and access to the benefits of OpenStack virtualized technologies, university researchers are now able to process and model complex data with significantly improved flexibility and system usability.
Dell EMC has worked closely with Research Institutional Services at UoC to pioneer solutions which use the best features of commodity hardware and open-source technologies to deliver HPC solutions. The Cambridge Bio-Medical Cloud, powered by Dell compute and storage servers, including the Dell PowerEdge C6320, the Dell PowerEdge R630 and the Dell PowerVault MD3460and Intel’s latest generation processors and NvRAM technologies coupled with high performance Ethernet networking, will deliver major compute and data analysis capabilities to the Cambridge bio-medical community.
“There’s a revolution occurring across scientific, technical and medical research disciplines, generating demand for platforms which can handle a large user-base of computational techniques and data intensive science,” said Bart Mellenbergh, director, HPC Dell EMC EMEA. “Dell EMC offers HPC capabilities, accelerated by the latest hardware technology, to handle the excessive demands of large scale data modelling whilst also providing additional flexibility and accessibility through open source cloud computing.”
“The Cambridge Bio-Medical Cloud heralds a transformation in the manner in which Research Computing Services are being delivered,” said Dr Paul Calleja, director, Research Computing at the UIS, University of Cambridge. “To address the challenges associated with HPC, large scale high performance data analytics and delivery of Web-Services, IaaS and cloud-based models, the University is adopting an agile Cloud service model centred on OpenStack. With the assistance of superior hardware and core technologies, this new platform will radically democratise access to large scale compute and data resources and ultimately contribute to significant advancements in the treatment discovery process.”