Last week I invited
customers to join us at CERN, in Geneva, one of the worlds’ most respected
scientific research institutions. We held an interactive conference, Accelerated Understanding, where several key speakers
focused on the optimisation of high
performance computing in research environments. It enabled us to combine
the knowledge of our guests and industry specialist speakers from CERN IT, Cambridge University,Intel, DataDirect
Networks and Dell in
highly interactive discussions and debate.
During day one of the
event I got to catch-up with Dr Helge Meinhard from CERN’s IT team and ask him a few
questions about the history of technology in research at CERN as well as what
challenges the CERN team face managing the huge volumes of data from the LHC
experiment. Here’s the video:
Also during day one
of the event we went on a tour of the CERN LHCb detector over 100 meters underground. Photos from
the event can be found on our official Flickr site.
On day two we
discussed best practices, future technology roadmaps and shared challenges that
we are all working towards solving. We filmed many of the discussion sessions
which we will be sharing in the coming weeks in our series of posts from CERN.
One of the most interesting
aspects of the event was to learn from our customers. The HPC (research
computing) area is, in many ways, still in its infancy. It is clear that
customers are pushing the envelope. In the areas of programming,
integration, platform optimisation and deployment, the customers are largely on
their own. As HPC becomes more mainstream Dell and our partners (the
industry) need to take a more holistic approach in order to simplify the
implementation of a cluster optimised for a given computational
environment. We are committed to moving this forward.
Stay tuned for further posts from CERN over on Inside Enterprise IT.