Over the last two years, E4 Computer Engineering and QCT have worked in close collaboration to supply CERN with thousands of server systems, cores, and Petabytes of storage.
Scandiano, June 15th 2017 - CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is one of the world’s largest and most well-regarded centres for scientific research. They are probing the fundamental structures of the universe. They use the world's largest and most complex scientific instruments to study the basic constituents of matter – the fundamental particles. The particles are made to collide together at close to the speed of light. The process gives the physicists clues about how the particles interact and provides insights into the fundamental laws of nature. The huge quantity of data generated by these types of collisions, that need to be processed, stored and made available to the whole scientific community, place extreme requirements in terms of computational performance and storage space.
Because High Energy Physics requires powerful computational systems to carry out the parallel and distributed computing, E4 Computer Engineering joined forces with Quanta Cloud Technology (QCT) to deliver 3,400 system units over the last couple of years, 60,000 cores and 10PBs of storage (3PBs on HDDs and 7PBs on SSDs). This is an impressive result. E4 Computer Engineering had been awarded a contract by CERN as the result of a competitive call for tender. The systems met CERN’s stringent criteria in terms of scalability, cost effectiveness and performance.
E4 Computer Engineering and QCT are dedicated to build, configure and deliver computational equipment to highly educated customers, such as CERN, with specific configurations and strict deadlines. This collaboration provides high performance computers combined with energy efficiency, with very low failure rates.
E4 Computer Engineering has a long and successful history of provisioning systems to CERN and to its Tier 1, INFN (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare) through competitive tenders. With thousands of x86 cores and petabytes of storage delivered, E4 expertise ensures improved scalability and increased grid performances.
“The longstanding relationship established with CERN has been particularly rewarding for our company because our engineers have been encouraged to adopt new procedures, methods and technologies, pushing us towards that level of excellence at which E4 Computer Engineering has sought for since its founding” said Cosimo Gianfreda, CTO E4 Computer Engineering. “We are also very proud about the partnership with QCT for the high flexibility of their hardware that always provides excellent expandability and configurability which adapts to the diverse range of data center infrastructure requirements”.
“Supporting scientific computing applications is an especially rewarding part of what we do at QCT,” said Mike Yang, President of QCT. “Our work with E4 has played an important role in supporting the applications that advance scientific understanding and the basic building blocks of our universe. All of this is driven by advanced computing and storage technologies, delivered with unsurpassed power and maintenance efficiency. We look forward to continuing our work with E4 to help CERN make discoveries that benefit all of humanity.”
“E4 has successfully supplied us with reliable and performant servers of the QCT brand over the last couple of years,” said Olof Bärring, Deputy Head of the computing facilities group, IT department, CERN. “The systems have proved to be suitable for different purposes ranging from High Throughput Computing (HTC) number crunching of physics data coming from LHC experiments to High Performance Computing (HPC) clusters for the CERN theory group. We are also very pleased with the reliable deliveries, the warranty support provided.”
About E4 Computer Engineering
Since 2002, E4 Computer Engineering has been innovating and actively encouraging the adoption of new
computing and storage technologies. Because new ideas are so important, we invest heavily in research
and hence in our future. Thanks to our comprehensive range of hardware, software and services, we are
able to offer our customers complete solutions for their most demanding workloads on: HPC, Big-Data, AI,
Deep Learning, Data Analytics, Cognitive Computing and for any challenging Storage and Computing
requirements. E4. When Performance Matters.
For more info: www.e4company.com