The University of Cambridge, one of the world's oldest and most prestigious academic institutions, has selected Red Hat to support its OpenStack-based high performance computing (HPC) initiatives. In addition to deploying Red Hat OpenStack Platform for its HPC-as-a-Service offering, the University of Cambridge also plans to collaborate with Red Hat to bring HPC capabilities to the upstream OpenStack community.
The University of Cambridge is one of the world's foremost research universities. Comprised of 31 colleges and more than 150 departments, faculties, schools and other institutions, its mission is "to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence." The University is a global leader in HPC, including its work to create some of the UK’s fastest supercomputers.
The University of Cambridge recognized an opportunity to extend its HPC & research computing leadership with a service offering available to a broader scientific and technology research community. Today, the Cambridge Research Computing Service (RCS) is responsible for hosting, system support, scientific support and service delivery of a large supercomputing resource for the University of Cambridge Research Community. Its principal facilities consist of a large CPU compute cluster (Darwin) and a world-leading energy efficient GPU compute cluster (Wilkes).
To accommodate its new Research computing-as-a-Service offering and keep the research institution at the forefront of large scale big-data science, the University of Cambridge turned to its longtime partners Dell and Intel to help it create one of the world’s most energy efficient datacenters. And, the University of Cambridge has selected Red Hat OpenStack Platform to power the Research computing-as-a-Service offering. Initially, the University of Cambridge had deployed OpenStack on a community-supported Linux during the proof-of-concept phase, but found that they needed a more reliable, integrated and supported OpenStack platform for production deployment, leading them to Red Hat OpenStack Platform.
Red Hat is an OpenStack leader - both in contributions to the upstream OpenStack community and its work to deliver a production-ready OpenStack platform to enterprise customers. Red Hat OpenStack Platform, a highly scalable, production-ready Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution, has emerged as the open source cloud platform of choice for a growing number of global organizations. By co-engineering with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, organizations can deploy OpenStack on a tested, reliable, and more secure foundation, backed by Red Hat’s award-winning enterprise support.
In addition to selecting Red Hat OpenStack Platform, the University of Cambridge chose to work with Red Hat because of the company’s leadership in open source communities and collaboration. Together, Red Hat and the University of Cambridge plan to bring HPC capabilities to the upstream OpenStack community, helping to advance the open source cloud platform for scientific research use cases.
