The Centre for Advanced Computing at Queen’s University boosted the performance of its HPC environment by a factor of five with a high-density Lenovo supercomputer. Equipped with high-performance Intel® Xeon® processors, the Lenovo cluster gives researchers the power they need to crunch data faster and get results quicker, accelerating time to insight.

1. Atmospheric scientists analyzing global weather patterns.
Psychologists modeling the brain and human memory.
Biotechnologists designing complex molecules for innovative
new drugs. With a Lenovo supercomputer, the Centre for
Advanced Computing (CAC) at Queen’s University is helping
researchers turn reams of data into scientific insight.
Queen’s University
Powerful research with ultra-efficient
supercomputer

2. As one of the leading universities in Canada, Queen’s is home
to hundreds of researchers – many of whom are at the very top
of their respective fields and making a real impact on society
with their work. From trying to find a cure for cancer to
modeling global economies, scientists at Queen’s are leading
the charge, as evidenced by Emeritus Professor Arthur
McDonald’s Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of
neutrino oscillation.
Don Aldridge, Executive Director of CAC at Queen’s, begins:
“One of the coolest things about my job is that I get to work
with rocket scientists and brain surgeons. At CAC, we help
researchers from all disciplines turn their data into results.”
How? With a Lenovo supercomputer system equipped with
powerful Intel® Xeon® processors.
“We invited several vendors to present their proposals for a
new high-performance computing [HPC] environment,” says
Don Aldridge. “We wanted a state-of-the-art supercomputer
capable of running the latest big data analytics software
programs and processing massive data sets quickly. Lenovo
came out on top – not just in terms of technology, but also
support. We weren’t just looking for a hardware vendor; we
wanted a partner that would care for us after we’d signed on
the dotted line.”

3. He recalls: “The Lenovo team took the time to examine all of
the workloads we support across the university research
community, and all of the individual requirements that the
different research teams have. Armed with this information,
Lenovo was able to fine-tune the configuration of our HPC
environment in terms of memory and performance bandwidth
to make sure it met everyone’s needs. The implementation
itself was super-quick – I blinked, and everything was up
and running!”
The Lenovo cluster, which takes up just 10% of the floor space
of CAC’s previous supercomputer, is powering ground-breaking
research at Queen’s – at much lower operating costs.
“Even though it’s a tenth of the size of our old system, we’re
getting five times the performance with our Lenovo
environment,” remarks Don Aldridge. “It’s so much more
efficient. We’re saving thousands of dollars a day in electricity
costs – cutting our annual power bill in half. Most importantly,
the huge performance increase means researchers can analyze
data sets faster and get results back more quickly.”
Today, around 1,000 users from across the university log onto
the Lenovo system every day. Don Aldridge comments:
“Software programs are running faster and we can process
many more batch jobs in a given computational cycle.
Researchers are really happy with the performance increase,
and we’ve now got teams processing data sets that there
simply wasn’t the capacity for previously.”
With the Lenovo HPC environment, CAC can handle anything
researchers throw at it – from analyzing streaming medical data
in real time to crunching petabytes of astrophysical data.

4. Don Aldridge concludes: “We’ve been so impressed with
the Lenovo cluster, and are confident that it can meet all of
our research computing needs for the foreseeable future.
The fact that we can easily add to and scale the
environment means that we will be able to continuously
integrate the latest tech, ensuring that our world-leading
research teams always have access to world-class
HPC resources.”
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“Researchers are really happy with the performance
increase, and we’ve now got teams processing data sets
that there simply wasn’t the capacity for previously.”
– Don Aldridge, Executive Director, Centre for Advanced Computing, Queen’s University
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5. The Centre for Advanced Computing at Queen’s University boosted the
performance of its HPC environment by a factor of five with a high-density
Lenovo supercomputer. Equipped with high-performance Intel® Xeon®
processors, the Lenovo cluster gives researchers the power they need to
crunch data faster and get results quicker, accelerating time to insight.
Queen’s University
Powerful research with ultra-efficient supercomputer
ACADEMIC RESEARCH
Solution
components
Hardware
Lenovo NeXtScale System
M5 technology with Intel®
Xeon® E5 processors
“Researchers are really happy with the performance increase, and we’ve
now got teams processing data sets that there simply wasn’t the
capacity for previously.”
—Don Aldridge, Executive Director, Centre for Advanced Computing,
Queen’s University