There was a lot of discussion around cluster management, big data and power efficiency

Last week saw OCF exhibiting at the 22nd Machine Evaluation Workshop, this year being held in Liverpool. The annual event is dedicated to distributed high performance scientific computing and aims to bring together scientific researchers and major vendors of HPC.
The new location enabled greater capacity from both vendors and delegates and was very well attended. Representatives in attendance included IBM, DataDirect Networks, Panasas, Platform Computing and Microsoft on the vendor side and delegates from STFC Daresbury Laboratory, Atomic Weapons Establishment, Swiss National Supercomputing Centre and Universities of Bristol, Birmingham and Edinburgh to name but a few.
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For me the big themes were big data, analytics, cloud, cooling, Exascale and Intel

Last week I attended the SC11 show in Seattle, Washington. As with most years (and as you would expect from the most well known industry gathering on the HPC calendar), it was a very busy show with all the expected vendors and a large number of buyers present. For me the big themes were big data, analytics, cloud, cooling, Exascale and Intel. I thought I’d talk through a couple of highlights:

Big data

There was lots of talk (and consensus) that the problem with big data isn’t the capacity to store big data, but how to access, use and find the data and, in doing so, make it into useful information. Continue Reading »

PICTURE 17: BRC can now manually archive data in accordance with its policies. It has two separate archives, one on-site and one off-site which reduces risk of data loss from system malfunction, disaster or other unplanned event. Picture: Don Lokuadassuriyage, Biomedical Research Centre System Administrator.

Last week I went to visit one of our customers, The National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) at Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust and King’s College London. It is one of only five NIHR comprehensive BRC’s in the UK and, since being formed in 2006 has made significant progress in translational research across a number of important disease areas.

The BRC uses a server and storage cluster designed and built by OCF using leading-edge technology from our partners IBM and Panasas.

I was very kindly taken on a tour of the centre by BRC Systems Administrator, Don Lokuadassuriyage, whilst he was in the process of being recorded for a video production! I just wanted to share a few photos below from the visit:

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