Case Studies - research Institutions

Research Institutions often have to carry out large and complex calculations. The links to the academic world made them great initial test beds for Grid technology - and the many success stories to emerge from these implementations provides a good set of Grid computing case studies.

Small college reaps big benefits from Cloud Computing

Company: Marian College

Business: Education, eresearch

Marian College, US, has used cloud computing by virtualising its infrastructure, making virtual servers available over the network practically on demand, and coordinating internal operations with an outside cloud managed by a service provider, BlueLock.

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Aachen University

Company: Aachen University

Business: Research Institution

Grid Solution: Sun

Europe’s Aachen University of Technology wanted to replace its outdated vector approach to supercomputing to increase computational power so to deliver higher performance for demanding applications. The solution they chose was open, flexible, cost-effective clustered symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) system from Sun.

Grid computing case study provided by Sun

Grid computing at Aachen University

High Performance Computing Virtual Laboratory

Company: High Performance Computing Virtual Laboratory

Business: Research Consortium

Grid Solution: Sun

The High Performance Computing Virtual Laboratory, or HPCVL, is run by a consortium of seven Canadian universities and colleges. Sun provided a comprehensive infrastructure composed of compute clusters, storage and remote access capabilities via a Web portal to support approximately 700 university-based and outside researchers. Among other benefits, it accelerated research with fivefold increase in system performance, enabled partly by throughput improvements from UltraSPARC IV+ processor upgrade and increased storage capacity by more than 15-fold.

Grid computing case study provided by Sun

Grid computing at the High Performance Computing Virtual Laboratory

Idaho National Laboratory

Company: Idaho National Laboratory

Business: Research Consortium

Grid Solution: Sun

The Idaho National Laboratory (INL) was formed in 2005 in a merger between Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory-West. It is dedicated to supporting the U.S. Department of Energy’s missions in nuclear and energy research. Searching for a secure collaboration for research, an increase in compute resources to accommodate complex scientific models and to obtain more detailed results, faster, INL deployed a high performance unified and secure grid computing infrastructure from Sun that can complete two trillion (2 teraflop) floating-point operations per second.

Grid computing case study provided by Sun

Grid computing at the Idaho National Laboratory

St. Francis Xavier University

Company: St. Francis Xavier University

Business: Research Institution

Grid Solution: Sun

St. Francis Xavier University (StFX) in Canada turned to Sun to enhance its capacity for conducting physics research in partnership with industry. It needed to run very complex software designed to run on clusters and scale to support simultaneous use of more CPUs. The solution was a cluster of AMD Opteron-based Sun Fire V20z servers running Solaris and connected via Myrinet network, with Sun StorageTek storage arrays.

Grid computing case study provided by Sun

Grid computing at St. Francis Xavier University

University of Notre Dame

Company: University of Notre Dame

Business: Research Institution

Grid Solution: Sun

The University of Notre Dame, Indiana, USA, needed to add capacity to meet growing demands while minimizing life cycle costs and limiting power and cooling requirements. The answer was to incrementally expand a high-performance computing cluster based on Sun Grid architecture. With high-performance computing cluster online within two days of delivery, the University has established scalable and flexible infrastructure for a cost-effective expansion.

Grid computing case study provided by Sun

Grid computing at the University of Notre Dame

Tokyo Institute of Technology

Company: Tokyo Institute of Technology

Business: Research Institution

Grid Solution: Sun

Tokyo Tech, the Tokyo Institute of Technology, is the largest institute of higher learning in Japan dedicated to studies in science and technology. They used a Grid computing solution employing Sun Fire servers and the Sun Grid Engine to establish a cost-efficient supercomputer grid environment to support advanced research that provides high-performance computing resources to scientists and students.

Grid computing case study provided by Sun

Grid computing at the Tokyo Institute of Technology