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Roc helps to support a new Research Platform at Queen’s University Belfast and Ulster University to deliver ground-breaking research

Roc is proud to have been part of the partnership with Alces Flight and Dell to help support a new research platform at Queen’s University Belfast and Ulster University, to deliver ground-breaking research, which uses the latest High Performing Computer (HPC) technology.

The Northern Ireland HPC (NI-HPC) ‘Kelvin2’ cluster is built through a partnership with Dell and Alces Flight. Roc brought together it’s capabilities in HPC, underpinned by its Platinum partner status with Dell and its continued relationship with Alces Flight, to deliver the collaborative HPC research platform that the Universities required. It provides computational power, high-speed storage and a networking infrastructure to process a wide range of scientific and technical data for research purposes. The cluster is composed of more than 150 different compute nodes which can work separately or together, delivering a total of more than 10,000 CPU cores, that can be used by researchers running any one of over 100 different software applications installed on the system.

The Universities’ knew they needed a best of breed platform for their research and an end-user model built on their Research Software Engineering (RSE) engagement. Their aim is to educate users today on the systems available, while keeping an eye on the user and system requirements of the future.

The approach taken with the University was to build the solution, and then focus on RSE transformational and growth activities to provide increased end-user engagement, agility and continuous improvement opportunities. The platform has reduced day-to-day management and lowered transitional risk, whilst increasing HPC capability and optimising new workflows.

Matt Franklin CEO, Roc said, ”Roc is all about using technology to make a difference and this project will enable the University to build upon its research capability to deliver a secure scalable and flexible platform to underpin that. We are delighted to have been able to bring together our Dell capabilities and Alces’ Flight partnership to help the University with this critical initiative.”