Dell Technologies Malaysia announced that it is working with Monash University in Malaysia to implement top-of-the-line HPC and AI solutions to help accelerate the university’s research and development computing capabilities in its campus in Sunway City, Selangor. The HPC solution will replace the university’s current platform and is expected to substantially accelerate computation capabilities to solve complex problems across its significant research portfolio.

The deployment of these new solutions at one of Malaysia’s leading and research-intensive universities further demonstrates Dell Technologies’ commitment to support the academia community with cutting-edge technology and resources, which are critical requirements to enable innovations in a data-driven landscape of today and in the future.

The new HPC for Monash University Malaysia consists of an array of Dell PowerEdge servers or compute nodes, the core of CPU and GPU computational workhorse.

Its computing capabilities are supported by over 800 Intel CPU cores, 165,000 NVIDIA CUDA cores and 10,000 tensor cores. With approximately 4.8 TB of CPU memory, 1.9 TB of GPU memory and 250 TB of storage, researchers can enjoy powerful processing power and ample storage space.

To ensure a seamless high-speed interconnection between these compute nodes, the platform is equipped with a 200Gbps InfiniBand network for extreme compute throughput. Meanwhile, to operate the platform, the HPC solutions is equipped with Bright Cluster Linux management software, a SLURM workload management system, and a collection of scientific applications such as ANSYS, VASP, GROMACS, OpenFOAM, PyTorch and TensorFlow, just to name a few.

With these new solutions, Monash University Malaysia can significantly improve its R&D’s operational simplicity and agility – enabled by powerful hardware, user-friendly management software, on-premise IT support, and a scalable infrastructure. Overall, addressing various demands of the university’s research community in the engineering, science, medicine, information technology, econometrics and social studies.

Dell Technologies is collaborating with Robust HPC to install all the hardware setup and user applications. Robust HPC, an award-winning Malaysian IT consultant and solution provider, will also be a solution partner for the university. We will work closely with the Monash team on a daily basis to ensure smooth communication and collaboration between all parties. In addition, Robust HPC will also provide the necessary technical services – from cluster planning, design, deployment and implementation to user training and residency operation support.

Once fully deployed, postgraduate research students and academic staff of Monash University Malaysia will have access to the leading HPC and AI platforms that provide critical computing resources to facilitate timely completion of new research. Ultimately, the university expects its researchers can publish these research leads in top scientific journals and conferences – an important milestone for any researcher in today’s highly competitive research landscape.

“Dell Technologies continues to be at the forefront of new and emerging technologies to help our customers keep pace with the constantly evolving landscape,” says Mak Chin Wah, country manager, Malaysia and general manager, Telecom Systems Business, South Asia, Dell Technologies.

“Our robust HPC and AI solutions, coupled with strong partnership with leading solutions providers, will help Monash University Malaysia achieve its vision to become a leading and preferred high-education institution for students and academia in Malaysia. Thus, reinforcing our commitment to help build and equip talents in Malaysia with the skills and resources critical to meet our digital future needs.”

“Our partnership with Dell Technologies, which will see us implement the next generation of HPC, realises our vision of establishing a premier high-performance computing, visualisation and immersive platform in Southeast Asia,” says President and Pro Vice-Chancellor of Monash University Malaysia, Professor Matthew Nicholson.

“Monash University Malaysia, through the leadership of the Advanced Computing Platform Director, Dr Vishnu Monn Baskaran, will continue to meet the growing and diversifying computing needs of educators and researchers in a sustainable manner”.

These enhanced capabilities are expected to strengthen Monash University’s reputation as one of the top universities in Malaysia and the preferred university for potential future students who would like to further their studies in an institution equipped with cutting edge technologies for innovation.

About Robust HPC
Robust HPC has been a supercomputing solution provider since 2010, with clientele in Malaysia & China. Robust team is highly capable of delivering end-to-end solutions and possesses proven track records in planning and design, strategy consultation, solution implementation, user training as well as user application benchmarking/profiling/support.