CORE: e-Infrastructure solutionsIDC HPC User Forum: 5 July 2012

Overview

• Introducing CORE

• Cambridge & Imperial background

• CORE detail – CORE HPC & data cloud– CORE consultancy

• CORE customers– Atomic Arts– Caterham F1 Team– Audio Analytic

• How to engage CORE

Introducing CORE

• What is CORE?– A shared HPC service between Cambridge and Imperial

• What does it do?– Creates a range of HPC and data services– Actively offers these services to UK SMEs, industry and

academic communities

• Why?– To increase UK competitiveness and drive growth – BIS led

initiative– Facilitate technology transfer from universities– Drive industry/university partnerships

CORE – a virtuous circle

Cambridge

• The University of Cambridge is a world leading teaching & research institution, consistently ranked within the top 3 Universities world wide

• Annual income of £800M – 40% is research related – one of the largest R&D budgets within the UK HE sector

• 17,000 students, 9,000 staff

• Cambridge is a major technology centre– over 1,200 SMEs in surrounding science parks– £4B annual revenue, 27,000 staff– 25% of UK VC, 8% of EU VC

HPC is recognised as an important enabling technology for University research and the wider Cambridge technology community

Imperial

• Consistently rated amongst the world's best universities, Imperial College London is a science-based institution with a reputation for excellence in teaching and research

• Annual income £700M of which £300M is from research grants and contracts

• 14,000 full-time students, 6,000 staff• Interaction with industry is a central part of Imperial’s mission

• Imperial Innovations was the first UK university commercialisation company to be listed on the London Stock Exchange– has raised over £200M (before issue costs) from investors since 2005– has holdings in 78 companies

HPC forms a key part of the research strategy, with investment of £1M per year in capital equipment alone

HPC @ Cambridge & Imperial

• There has been large scale HPC at both institutions for many years

• Investments in e-Infrastructure across the consortium are ~£2.5M per annum

• Both Cambridge and Imperial run a centralised HPC and data storage capability open to all departments in the institutions

• Cambridge runs as a pay-per-use cloud charging users at point of use.

• Imperial runs a traditional top-sliced with incentives for users to buy in

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• Together they service the largest in-house scientific, technical and medical research community in Europe

CORE services

• CORE is one of the best equipped and supported HPC services in the UK

• CORE has generated:– HPC and data management solutions– outreach and support staff focused on pushing those services

out to UK SME’s and Industry

• CORE HPC & data cloud – Remote resource provision with strong support – i.e. not a VM

cloud

• CORE consultancy– A comprehensive set of consultancy packages designed to

help CORE customers design, procure, implement, optimise and run their own in-house HPC systems

CORE Cloud – Scalability

• CORE customers have access to over £8M of HPC – Cambridge, Imperial and the STFC DiRAC national HPC service

• Largest and most versatile HPC and data analysis resource available in the UK

• Single managed entity as a fully supported pay-per-use service

• In total the CORE cloud provides access to over 22,000 Intel cores with over 300 TF of sustained DP performance and over 3 PB of HPC parallel file system

CORE Cloud – Versatility

Highest performance Intel cluster in UK

183 TF – 93rd in world

9,600 coresDell C6220Mellanox FDR56 Gb/s – 72 Tb/s

Largest single image shared memory system in UK

2,000 Intel cores16 TB single memory space

Early access to Intel MIC

One of the Largest NVIDIA GPU clustersin UK

Only UK CUDA COE

One of the first Xyratex Lustre systems deployed in the UK

1 PB of the highest density, highest performance storage in the market

High performanceDell commodity Lustre solutions 1.5 PB

Hadoop on demand

CORE Cloud – Support-centred

• The CORE HPC & data cloud is not like other leading clouds where you are expected to submit your VM and go it alone !

Lots of CORE

technical support

• The CORE team:– supports one of the largest scientific, technical and medical

user communities in Europe – has many years of experience helping new HPC users to utilise

advanced e-Infrastructure

• In our experience a support-centred approach is vital for the provision of HPC and large scale data resources

CORE consultancy packages

HPC start up package

Production HPC profiling & development consultancy

HPC design, procurement and project management services

HPC trouble shooting

HPC solution support

HPC storage profiling

HPC visualisation consultancy

Scientific support

CORE customers

• The CORE HPC team has been working with industry for many years, helping its partners of all sizes and experience level utilise HPC to drive a competitive advantage for their business

• The Cambridge CORE team alone has engaged with over 26 industrial partners in the last 18 months and derives 30% of its income from industrial activities.

– Audio Analytic– Xyratex– Atomic Arts– Caterham F1– Team NZ– South African National supercomputer centre

CORE customer – Atomic Arts

• Atomic Arts is a post-production boutique in the west end of London specialising in animation and special effects for film and TV – BAFTA-nominated

• The workload is often compute and data intensive

• Deadlines are often short and workload burst-like in nature

• This provides a problem for small companies not having the resources to meet peak demand

• CORE implemented an on-demand virtual image of the Atomic animation environment to use from one to thousands of cores

• This flexibility allows Atomic to take on jobs that would require far more resources than they have available with their in-house equipment

www.atomicarts.net

CORE customer – Caterham F1 Team

• Caterham were in a race to set up!

• CORE provided a full solution – Office space– High powered CAD workstations– Full on-demand HPC cloud

• After setup when Caterham had their own HPC solution – Trouble shoot and fix IB performance problem– Design and implement high performance NFS storage solution– Provide initial HPC system administration assistance to in house staff

• CORE still act as a trusted advisor and HPC DR capability

CORE customer – Audio Analytic

• Develop sound-recognition software for the physical security industry

• Generate Sound Packs e.g. glass break

• Record hundreds of examples:

– laminate, plate, wired, tempered

– different implements

– different microphones

• Use CORE HPC facilities to analyse and characterise these sounds

• Validate against thousands of hours of other sound recordings – minimise false positives

www.audioanalytic.com

In summary

Delivering competitive advantage

How to engage CORE

The objective of CORE is to drive the engagement process between UK academia and industry. We are set up with the people, attitude and infrastructure to facilitate initiation meetings.

Email

Phone

Customer site meetings

Meet at CORE offices in London or Cambridge

Free starter package of 10,000 core hours, free initial consultation and one day free support

www.core-advantage.org

How to engage CORE