Universities offered high-performance computing cloud via Janet

July 19, 2011 Off By David
Grazed from Computer Weekly.  Author: Cliff Saran.

Universities can now run cloud-based research on Janet, the joint academic network.

The UK-based service from Logicalis is built on the IBM Power7 platform. It enables communities of researchers to pool their funding to buy a shared slice of high-performance computer (HPC) processing. The Logicalis cloud dynamically allocates the HPC pool equitably in real-time, with each institution able to use up to 100% of the pool.

Tim Marshall, CEO at Janet (UK) said: "UK Research is a key driver in the knowledge economy, and when funding is constrained finding new models to exploit opportunities such as high-performance computing is critical."

The research cloud provides dynamic sharing of high-performance computing platforms, which Logicalis says can dramatically cut the cost of accessing these scarce processing resources.

Tom Kelly, managing director of Logicalis, said: "For those universities where research is a primary source of income, balancing the need for high-performance computing power with diminishing budgets puts their global competitive edge at stake. Sharing a large slice of high-performance computing, across a network they trust, offers a major opportunity for academics running research projects to access the computing resources they need at a fraction of the cost of building it themselves."

The Logicalis Shared Research Cloud is one of a new range of services offered by Logicalis to the education community through its connection to the joint academic network. Logicalis recently announced availability of its Intel cloud platform, and plans to launch a research collaboration service in the autumn of 2011. This will enable researchers to work more collaboratively on projects both internally and within the wider research ecosystem. Logicalis believes that by combining HPC platforms and cloud-based collaboration, the UK higher education research community will be able to better compete with the growing competition from emerging research-focused nations.

Simon Daykin, CTO at Logicalis UK, said: "The UK has a unique asset in Janet, one that is undervalued and underestimated outside of the sector, and with the launch of the Shared Research Cloud we hope to be able to demonstrate the UK is the place where private sector companies around the world should bring their research projects. The technology behind this platform is well understood and used in high computational environments, and in being able to share this resource across the research community, we are changing the cost model and competitiveness of an already strong sector.

The platform can support Unix and Linux HPC workloads.