BIG DATA

Wirth Research and its subsidiary Digital Flow Solutions are a very successful UK Research Technology company specialising in the design and implementation of High Performance Cars and Race Simulators. These markets require increasingly accurate and more complex simulations to get the best results for their customers. This requires a regular and substantial boost of their computing resources but without the cost and resource of increasing the complexity and support load. Streamline computing were able to meet these criteria and utilise the Concurrent Command Appliance technology of its parent Concurrent Thinking Ltd to deliver a powerful but easy to manage cluster to Wirth and bring fully into service only days after delivery. “We had a number of smaller early clusters but the management overhead and lack of a simple upgrade solution meant that we could not see these fulfilling our increasing need for Computing Power – in particular for CFD applications. “ said Rob Rowsell CFD team leader at Digital Flow Solutions. “We tendered for a system and the solution offered by Streamline based on the Concurrent Appliances and Dell hardware technology clearly showed us a supplier who had deep experience in Cluster Computing for CFD and the means to simplify the management task of such clusters. Utilising Concurrent Command on the Streamline cluster takes a great deal of the initial complexity out of HPC clusters and allows our staff to focus on increased workflow for our consultancy customers. The new cluster is based on Dell 1435 Opteron Nodes with a low latency Infinipath Interconnect from Q-logic to best exploit Fluent and related applications. Care was taken to ensure that a high performance disk subsystem could match the data IO requirements of these nodes and subsequently remove any performance bottlenecks in the design. The Jackrabbit Storage server from Scalable Informatics provided a very cost effective but powerful solution for this need. The overall cluster includes a dedicated cluster management appliance, Concurrent Control, per compute rack, each of which combine through the Concurrent Command option to monitor the whole cluster environment and to provide easy to use, single point, cluster control capabilities. The overall solution architecture has been designed to deliver the maximum performance from commodity hardware supported by a dedicated Streamline technical team in order to ensure high quality optimised management and scheduling of the required CFD Environment. Concurrent Command, Concurrent Process and the appliance family are designed to support multiple vendor hardware so the appliances can both consolidate existing systems and allow flexibility when adding future cluster upgrades to the Wirth Facilities. For Wirth this gives them the best value from the commodity market but without the costs involved in having to learn a completely new vendor specific management system for each cluster.