University of Michigan’s New “Great Lakes” Supercomputer to Enhance Research Capabilities

The University of Michigan has a new supercomputer named “Great Lakes” that will enhance the university research activities and provide scalable high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure for thousands of users across the university.

Deployed by Dell EMC, Great Lakes is networked and optimized by a new generation of technology from Mellanox Technologies in Dallas.

“The smart in-network computing acceleration engines that InfiniBand enables will deliver the highest performance, efficiency, and scalability for the University of Michigan users, for both HPC and AI applications,” says Gilad Shainer, vice president of marketing at Mellanox Technologies.

The Great Lakes supercomputer is expected to be running at full capacity and be available to the U-M community in the first half of 2019.

“Access to high-performance computing resources is a critical component of the University of Michigan’s rich computing ecosystem,” says Ravi Pendse, vice president for information technology and chief information officer at U-M. “Investigators in emerging fields like machine learning and precision health, among many others, will see improved computing performance with Great Lakes.”

Thierry Pellegrino, vice president of Dell EMC High Performance Computing, says, “This Great Lakes cluster will offer an exceptional boost in performance, throughput, and response to reduce the time needed for University of Michigan researchers to make the next big discovery in a range of disciplines from AI to genomics and bioscience.”