The HPCS provides all departments across the University of Cambridge with centralised, high-performance computing research services. The University maintains a commitment to complement its scientific and engineering expertise with a computing service that meets the demands of twenty-first century simulation and analysis challenges. The HPCS provides a platform for diverse software applications from multiple computing domains including bioinformatics, computational fluid dynamics and computational physics & mathematics. Success of the service is measured tightly in terms of system utilisation and job throughput.

Cambridge has deployed the Panasas ActivStore AS5000 solution with the PanFS parallel file system. "It is critical that our centralised service provides the ideal platform for software applications with different compute, memory and storage requirements", stated Dr. Paul Calleja, University of Cambridge director of HPC. "The Panasas PanFS parallel file system significantly boosts the performance of applications that take advantage of parallel I/O. Each node on our cluster runs the Panasas DirectFlow client software and has a physical data path to the storage giving us the flexibility to employ parallel I/O across all nodes for single jobs or many individual jobs performing I/O simultaneously. Our users are enjoying an increased job throughput following the deployment of the Panasas solution."

The Panasas solution has allowed the HPCS to fulfill its requirements for both performance and data availability with a single solution by providing a highly reliable platform with increased capacity for home directories as well as superior application performance with parallel I/O. "The reliability of the Panasas solution benefits users with increased uptime, and its manageability has allowed us to reduce our administrative overhead", concluded Dr. Calleja.