University of Oslo chose MEGWARE for new HPC resource Abel
Oslo/Norway, March 30, 2012 - Maximizing science production over TCO has been the governing principle when the University of Oslo chose HPC solution from MEGWARE Computer Vertrieb und Service GmbH
The University of Oslo (UiO) and MEGWARE Computer Vertrieb und Service GmbH have signed a contract for a new HPC resource to be installed at the University’s central IT department (USIT). The coming system, named Abel after the famous Norwegian mathematician, will have an aggregated theoretical peak performance of nearly 260 TFLOPS, and be geared towards a wide range of research with demanding data handling applications. The Abel system is funded by the Research Council of Norway (RCN) and the University of Oslo, and will be part of the Norwegian infrastructure for research computing, NOTUR.
“The Abel system will strengthen the University of Oslo’s position as a leading European research university”, says UiO IT-director Lars Oftedal. Abel is designed for running a large number of concurrent tasks with large datasets and/or memory requirements. Such applications are found in an increasing number of research disciplines, but in particular in life sciences (bioinformatics), climate research and high-energy physics.
“Computational jobs were interfering with each other more and more, so we decided to take a divide-and-conquer approach in the design of Abel”, says Dr. Hans Eide, Manager of Scientific Computing at USIT, University Center for Information Technology at UiO. The result was a comprehensive and challenging Request for proposal that in the end saw MEGWARE Computer Vertrieb und Service GmbH come out first, with only half of the vendors even making it to the finish-line.
“MEGWARE is very proud to have won the Abel installation, it really shows that a competence-based company with a focus on HPC can compete with the big all-round players”, states Jürgen Gretzschel, MEGWARE Managing Director. MEGWARE will provide UiO with more than 10k CPU cores based on the latest Intel Sandy Bridge architecture. A central storage system will be based on the Fraunhofer Parallel Cluster File System (FhGFS). The entire system will be interconnected with Mellanox FDR Infiniband technology for PCI-gen3.
"With the order from Norway our goal to move into the Scandinavian market has been more than met and we can look optimistically towards a future in which we are a consistent partner in the field of supercomputing in Scandinavia", says Jörg Heydemüller, MEGWARE Sales Manager. The Abel system is to be installed in June 2012 and will be located in new datacenter facilities recently built as part of the new Informatics Department building on the UiO campus, named after the Ole Johan Dahl, father of object oriented programming languages and creator of Simula.
About University of Oslo (UiO) and USIT
The Research Computing Services group (RCS) within USIT (University Center for Information Technology) is a competence-focused resource for researchers both inside and outside the University of Oslo. The RCS provides HPC infrastructure and high-level research and technical competence, in order to efficiently translate research problems into solutions with the aid of a wide range of IT tools. The responsibilities of the RCS include performing the duties for UiO in national and international HPC and e-science projects. UiO is a partner in the Notur II project (2005-2014), which provides the Norwegian infrastructure for High-Performance Computing. UiO is through RCS participating in international research and grid activities, such as the World-wide LHC Computation Grid (WLGC) and the Nordic distributed Tier-1 site, PRACE, and EGI. http://www.usit.uio.no/
About MEGWARE
MEGWARE Computer Vertrieb and Service GmbH is a leading manufacturer of high performance computers and IT technology with customers in Germany and Europe. As a full-service provider in the field of supercomputing MEGWARE has realized over 500 HPC projects. The company offers turnkey solutions which are customized to the specific requirements of a broad range of customers from industry, academia and research. MEGWARE cooperates with technology leaders and places great importance on long-term and reliable relations to customers and business partners.
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