Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has revealed it has built a high performance computing (HPC) cluster for the City University of Hong Kong (CityU).
HPE said the new HPC cluster is a significant performance upgrade to CityU’s previous HPC resources, delivering nearly 10 times faster speed in HPC and AI applications to improve modeling and simulation across biomedicine, quantum chemistry, and social and behavioral science.
“The new HPC cluster brings us one step closer to building Hong Kong’s most powerful HPC platform for academia while achieving operational efficiency and reduced costs,” said Dr. Dominic Chien, Senior Scientific Officer (HPC) at CityU.
CityU’s HPC resources are used by Hong Kong’s academic and government researchers to accelerate scientific discovery in many areas.
Previously, CityU’s resources were comprised of siloed clusters that used older generations of computing solutions.
The CityU HPC cluster, which CityU named “CityU Burgundy,” is built using the HPE Apollo 2000 and HPE Apollo 6500 Gen10 Plus systems, which are purpose-built, density optimized platforms that target demanding HPC and AI applications.
HPE designed CityU Burgundy with 328 AMD EPYC™ 7742 processors to provide a performance boost to 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 capabilities.
“High performance computing plays a critical role in delivering new capabilities for harnessing large amounts of data to process and generate meaningful insights in almost any field of study,” said Bill Mannel, vice president and general manager, HPC, at HPE.
CityU operates 10 schools and 30 departments with approximately 10,000 students, 1,500 faculty staff and 39 research centers, running a few thousand research projects.
