Esteem deploys supercomputing for research universities

Souped-up new cluster to support research into common diseases across eight northern universities

Esteem IT has designed and built new supercomputing facilities for the N8 Research Partnership group of eight universities in the North of England.

Joe Connolly, chief executive of Esteem, said the opportunity followed the HPC specialist's previous HPC design-and-install for the N8 group.

"The extra capabilities of the SGI UV2 [supercomputing cluster] will transform what were isolated research projects into co-ordinated, powerful research teams across northern England," Connolly (pictured) said.

The x86-based cluster incorporates 4TB of memory and 256 cores, allowing researchers to analyse more complicated models of larger populations in shorter amounts of time than the current infrastructure. The large shared-memory computing platform will open up new avenues of research, according to Esteem.

Rod Evans, EMEA vice president at HPC vendor SGI (formerly Silicon Graphics, Inc), said the cluster would analyse public health records as part of the work of the Health eResearch Centre – a regional health informatics research centre that is studying common diseases and feeds e-health applications into the Northern Health Science Alliance.

The project was funded by the Medical Research Council as part of a Farr Institute for Health Informatics Research investment.

The new cluster is housed alongside a regional N8 HPC cluster at the University of Leeds, where it will be used by all eight universities, including the universities of Manchester, Durham, Lancaster, Liverpool, Newcastle, Sheffield and York.