ENERGY MANAGEMENT
“ This shift to scientific research being done remotely will lead to more collaboration between different academic institutions all over the world ”
MAURIZIO DAVINI CTO , UNIVERSITY OF PISA
by the university − a network that Davini himself had a hand in establishing . “ That fibre network started to be put in place in the late 1990s , and now we have around 90 kilometres of cable , which contain around 9,000 kilometres of optical fibre running underneath the streets of Pisa ,” he says . “ The network was built using mono-modal fibre , so now we can do almost whatever we want with regards to speed , latency and so on . We like to think of the university network as a whiteboard − a blank slate on which you can create any network that you want . On this whiteboard , we put our three data centres .”
This whiteboard approach to designing the university ’ s underlying infrastructure has been incredibly valuable , not only in the University of Pisa ’ s efforts to adapt to the evolving HPC landscape , but also in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic .
Going Remote in the Age of COVID-19 “ The pandemic found us in the middle of this transformation process ,” Davini recalls , reflecting that those efforts “ have been very helpful to our efforts to address the problems that the university faced as a result of the crisis .”
HPC in a Post-COVID World
Increasingly , HPC is experiencing a similar journey to other enterprise and administrative functions : it ’ s headed to the cloud . “ The ability to pay-per-use for HPC resources in the cloud makes its strategic advantages affordable for almost any organisation , including universities ,” says Christopher Huggins , the EMEA Business Director for Data Centric Workloads & Solutions at Dell Technologies . “ And , while some organisations may not be comfortable with every type of cloud computing , sharing HPC compute and storage resources over a network is hardly news to veteran IT shops .”
Davini adds : “ In the past , there was the idea that , to do HPC analysis , you would come to Pisa and do it on-site . Now , that perception has shifted . I think this shift to scientific research and HPC workloads being done remotely will lead to more collaboration between different academic institutions all over the world , especially while international travel is being limited by the effects of the pandemic .”
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