The new cluster provides centralized high-performance computing (HPC) and AI capabilities to advance research and achieve breakthroughs in areas such as biomedicine, quantum chemistry, and social and behavioral sciences.
HONG KONG, April 06, 2022–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) today announced that it has launched a new High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster for the City University of Hong Kong (CityU), one of the world’s leading universities, to strengthen scientific research and accelerate innovation. The new HPC cluster is a significant performance upgrade over CityU’s previous HPC resources, delivering nearly 10X faster speed1 in HPC and AI applications to improve modeling and simulation in the fields of biomedicine, quantum chemistry, and social and behavioral sciences.
“At CityU, HPC plays a critical role in building and supporting a world-class research team to continue making scientific breakthroughs for humankind,” said Dr. Dominic Chien, Senior Scientific Officer (HPC) at CityU. “The new HPC cluster brings us one step closer to building Hong Kong’s most powerful HPC platform for science while achieving operational efficiencies and reduced costs. It is particularly encouraging to see an early sign of success as the HPC platform has helped reduce the turnaround time of calculations by three to sevenfold in a quantum chemistry research project.”
CityU’s HPC resources are used by academic and government researchers in Hong Kong to accelerate scientific discovery in many fields. It is also CityU’s mission to implement its “Inclusive Strategy” where stakeholders from different disciplines can collaborate effectively using its technologies. Previously, CityU’s resources consisted of siled clusters using older generations of computing solutions that were not scalable and could not support the demand for higher computing power. The disparate system presented a challenge to a growing number of users to efficiently access the technology and achieve their research goals.
To meet this challenge, CityU turned to HPE to develop a significantly faster core HPC cluster to serve as an energy-efficient, centralized system for its research community. Other advances include lower latency networks, as well as advanced computation and accelerated computation to tackle data-intensive projects in modeling, simulation, AI, and machine learning.
The new CityU HPC cluster, which CityU named CityU Burgundy, is created using HPApollo 2000 and HPE Apollo 6500 Gen10 Plus Systems, which are purpose-built, density-optimized platforms targeting demanding HPC and AI applications. HPE also co-designed CityU Burgundy 328 AMD EPYC™ 7742 processors to provide a performance boost for core modeling and simulation workloads, and 56 NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPUs and 8 NVIDIA A100 80GB tensor-core GPUs to support a range of image analysis, machine learning and AI functions.
Extended project areas with CityU Burgundy – the new central HPC cluster
The overall advanced system and increase in computing power has enabled CityU researchers to advance the following initiatives:
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Advancement of biomedicine to accelerate understanding of chronic diseases and their treatment – Researchers specializing in genetic and molecular epidemiology have used the new HPC cluster to study the complexities of chronic diseases and explore new preventive approaches. This includes diagnosis and treatment through integration and analysis of variants in multiomics, biomarkers and environmental data from different populations.
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Expanding the use of HPC in other disciplines – The cluster’s GPU capabilities have unlocked new approaches to data analysis and supported projects that were not traditionally typical use cases for high performance computing. These research projects involve the creation of data visualizations and analysis of data related to marketing, public policy and finance.
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Research such as consumer behavior science and algorithmic trading – Researchers were previously unable to support these projects due to limited GPU capacity and high latency issues. These research efforts are now in full swing.
“High performance computing continues to play a critical role in providing new ways to use big data to process and generate meaningful insights in nearly every area of study,” said Bill Mannel, vice president and general manager, HPC, at HPE. “We are honored to have provided advanced HPC resources to City University of Hong Kong by designing a significantly faster HPC cluster with end-to-end energy-efficient solutions that inspire other applications of supercomputing across disciplines from traditional forms of science, such as physical, biological, and chemical sciences, to behavioral and social studies.”
By consolidating computing capacity into a single site with the new centralized HPC, CityU has simultaneously increased computing capacity and utilization while significantly reducing data center space and carbon footprint. The consolidated location also allows CityU’s IT team to easily and effectively measure energy demand and save additional electricity by shutting down more cooling equipment in different buildings.
About the City University of Hong Kong
Led and supported by internationally renowned faculties, City University of Hong Kong (CityU) provides professional education and problem-oriented research to improve people’s quality of life in the rapidly changing 21st century. As a growing university, CityU now operates 10 schools and 30 departments with approximately 10,000 students, 1,500 faculty and 39 research centers conducting several thousand research projects.
About Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE) is the global edge-to-cloud company that helps businesses accelerate results by unlocking value from all their data, anywhere, anytime. Building on decades of reshaping the future and innovating to advance the way people live and work, HPE offers unique, open and intelligent technology solutions as a service. With offerings spanning Cloud Services, Compute, High Performance Computing & AI, Intelligent Edge, Software and Storage, HPE provides a consistent experience across all clouds and edges, helping customers create new business models, break new ground and improve operational performance to increase. For more information visit: www.hpe.com
1 The new system at City Hong Kong University is almost ten times more powerful than its previous HPC resources. Source: https://www.cityu.edu.hk/csc/deptweb/services/hpc_research.htm
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