SCIENCE

Compute Canada announced it will partner with Super Micro Computer, Inc. to build a high-performance computing platform for its HPC for the Humanities initiative.

HPC for the Humanities is part of a distributed network of high-performance computers sharing data resources and tools among academic researchers throughout Canada. This initiative will enable humanities researchers to take advantage of the enormous potential of high performance computing to deal with large and complex sets of unstructured data in the form of books, election and financial data, archaeological information and newspapers. Researchers will be able to sort, mine, and visualize data and to ask new questions about events, the development of civilization, as well as written, audio and video materials. Supermicro's 8-Way architecture, GPU support, mass-storage capacity and high-throughput I/O capabilities provide an excellent foundation for high computational performance and scalability.

"High performance computing in the social sciences and humanities is central to advancing creativity and innovation," stated Chad Gaffield, President, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. "This initiative will help to support our scholars and their partners in advancing knowledge on a wide array of topics that are central to our economy and quality of life."

"We qualified Supermicro based on their product performance/price, service quality, green power efficiency, and company history," said Susan Baldwin, Executive Director of Compute Canada. "Supermicro's culture of innovation and integration expertise aligns well with our charter to foster a new era in HPC evolution and to continue to provide the HPC resources needed for world-leading research. As part of Supermicro's integrated solution we would also like to acknowledge Intel, Samsung, Toshiba and LSI for contributing to this project as well."

Researchers will have the advantage of an HPC system based on Supermicro's 8-Way, 5U SuperServer (5086B-TRF) which supports 80 Cores with 8x Intel Xeon processor E7-8800 (10-Core) and integrates up to 2TB of Samsung DDR3 ECC reg. DIMMs. The system also includes 4.8TB of Toshiba/LSI RAID storage and expandability for up to 4 GPUs. This is an enterprise-class platform designed for mission-critical applications and high-availability.

"Developing new understanding of the human system will require the ability to efficiently analyze massive amounts of data to reach new insights," said Raj Hazra, General Manager of High Performance Computing at Intel. "The Xeon processor E7-8800 is one of our most advanced technologies today for this kind of problem. We are excited to participate in this initiative."

"Supermicro's HPC SuperServers have a wide range of applications in the fields of academia and research," said Dr. Tau Leng, GM of HPC Solutions at Super Micro Computer, Inc. "HPC for the Humanities will achieve new levels of collaboration using our high-density, scalable HPC solutions. We look forward to advancing this and future HPC initiatives with Compute Canada."