Case Study: Durham University Deploys Liqid Composable Infrastructure to Study Universe’s 14 Billion-Year History with Adaptive, More Sustainable Infrastructure

LIQID Inc., one of the world’s leading software companies delivering data center composability, announced today a new case study with Durham University in Durham, England, describing its deployment of Liqid composable disaggregated infrastructure (CDI) software. Durham University is home to the COSmology MAchine (COSMA) operated by the Institute for Computational Cosmology (ICC) and is a national supercomputing facility that is part of the UK’s Distributed Research utilizing Advanced Computing (DiRAC) system. Liqid Matrix™ CDI software is part of a system used to study the origins of the universe, composing disaggregated GPUs in a tight footprint designed for a more sustainable digital architecture. With the ability to grow as resources are needed, the Liqid system will help researchers in the UK and around the world unlock the mysteries of the 14 billion-year history of the cosmos with far greater speed and efficiency than traditional data center systems.

“We are honored to work with institutions like Durham University and COSMA researchers to provide the resources to better explore the most profound questions in science,” said Sumit Puri, CEO & Cofounder, Liqid. “By providing the kind of software-defined data performance and architectural flexibility for powerful GPU, Liqid is enabling research breakthroughs that would have been impossible with traditional, static data center architectures so scientists can focus on results instead of waiting for resources and performance to become available.”

Liqid Matrix CDI Delivers Big Bang for Cosmologists with Adaptive, Efficient Architecture

“Durham University is using cutting-edge CDI to accelerate research, improve resource utilization, and reduce the university’s carbon footprint,” said Alistair Basden, technical manager for the DiRAC Memory Intensive Service at Durham University, who was interviewed for the case study entitled Durham University’s Institute for Computational Cosmology Accelerates Results with Composability from Liqid.

The COSMA memory-intensive system is designed specifically to support the largest cosmological simulations, most notably running simulations starting with the Big Bang and propagating through the entire history of the universe. Each simulation of dark matter, dark energy, black holes, galaxies and other structures in the universe often takes months to run, followed by long periods of data analysis.

While all of the applications deployed by DiRAC are memory intensive, valuable GPU resources are required for some of its most challenging simulations and analysis. Durham University chose Liqid Matrix software-based composable system in order to be able to share and scale GPUs in the exact amounts required for any given workload. Once the workload has been completed, GPU resources can be redistributed through Liqid Matrix software for use by other applications.

“It would be wasteful for us to populate all our nodes with GPUs,” Basden said in an interview for the case study. “Instead, we have some fat compute nodes and a login node, and we’re able to move GPUs between those systems. Composing our GPUs gives us flexibility with a smaller number of GPUs. We can individually populate the servers with one or more GPUs as required at the click of a button.”

Durham University IT is also deploying Liqid Matrix-based systems as an element of its overall strategy for a more sustainable IT ecosystem. Software-based composability enables users to do more with less, increasing efficiency and curtailing the need for physical space to store the hardware while providing significant reductions in cooling and water requirements.

“Rather than populating all our servers with GPUs, we can compose the resources we need to each server. That reduces our carbon footprint,” said Basden.

To learn more about Liqid’s academic deployments, review Liqid’s case study outlining the company’s work with the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Electronic Visualization Laboratory. Schedule an appointment with an expert on solutions based on Liqid Matrix ™ CDI software-based and set up a free infrastructure evaluation by going here. Follow Liqid on Twitter and LinkedIn to stay up to date with the latest Liqid news and industry insights.

About Liqid Inc.

Liqid’s composable infrastructure software platform, Liqid Matrix ™, unlocks cloud-like speed and flexibility plus higher efficiency from on-prem infrastructure. Now IT professionals can configure, deploy, and scale physical, bare-metal servers in seconds, then reallocate valuable accelerator and storage resources via software as needs evolve. Dynamically provision previously impossible systems or scale existing investments, and then redeploy resources where needed in real-time. Unlock cloud-like datacenter agility at any scale and experience new levels of resource and operational efficiency with Liqid.

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Contact information

Robert Brumfield
Sr. Director, Global Communications
Liqid Inc.
917 224 7769
brumfield.bob@liqid.com