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The Data Accelerator

The Data Accelerator (DAC) orchestrates the creation of burst buffers using commodity hardware and existing parallel file systems on the University of Cambridge HPC system Cumulus. Current focus is on creating NVMe backed Lustre file systems via Slurm's Burst Buffer support 

More information on the DAC and Cumulus system can be found here: 

• In June 2019 it reached #1 in the io500: https://www.vi4io.org/io500/list/19-06/full
• DAC github page https://rse-cambridge.github.io/data-acc/
• The Cumulus supercomputer systems: https://www.top500.org/system/179577

Currently this makes use of 24 Dell EMC R740xd nodes. Each contains two Intel OmniPath network adapters and 12 Intel P4600 SSDs. Plans are in progress to support Mellanox HDR as well as other parallel file systems. A whitepaper discussing the co-design between Cambridge, Intel, DellEMC and StackHPC is available here:

• https://www.dellemc.com/resources/en-us/asset/white-papers/products/ready-solutions/dell-data-accelerator-cambridge.pdf

For more information contact: dac@hpc.cam.ac.uk