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Case Study
How Red Oak’s consultancy helped shape Imperial College London’s HPC, and sustainability, journey
The Customer
Established in 1907, Imperial College London (ICL) is a research university focussing upon science, engineering, business, and medicine. Since Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, first set out his vision to enhance South Kensington culture, taking in the Royal Albert Hall, museums and a collection of colleges that would eventually form ICL, the university has gained an enviable reputation globally for scientific learning, and research.
The ICT (Information Communication and Technology) department at Imperial primarily serves three functions; to support research, education and overall support of the University.
Heading by director of research, Andrew Richards, the research computing services within ICT consists of three teams that support the whole research process and lifecycles. The platform team delivers high-performance computing (HPC), the research software engineering team who help to deliver best practice for software engineering within the organisation, and the research management applications team which supports the research environment, helping to publish data at scale, and make it widely accessible.
One of ICT’s core areas is HPC, currently very much on-premises, to help facilitate research. It runs 80,000 cores of CPU, approximately 300 GPUs and approximately 12 petabytes of storage underpinning the incumbent infrastructure.
The Challenge
Utilising HPC on-premises has been satisfactory in most parts for Imperial, however, certain use cases are better served by managing operations within the cloud – both commercial cloud and on-premises cloud. This was a key challenge, and why Imperial identified the need to engage with Red Oak Consulting to better understand the needs of the researchers within the international university community.
Part of the discovery process was to examine the use of commercial cloud resources by researchers within Imperial to determine if a move to cloud resources was suitable for the community. The information gathered from this was subsequently used to formulate a coordinated approach to future cloud usage.
Additionally, established resources, in place for research purposes, were being used to support certain aspects of teaching. This challenge was not inherently a problem, but the access structure was not established for this purpose and resulted in backlogs and interruptions to research lines. Therefore, the investigation also considered whether cloud resources would enable research and teaching to get the support they needed at the time(s) they were needed.
Critically, the ICT management team at Imperial needed an independent view of how resources were being used, and for Red Oak to have isolated conversations with people and departments to formulate a strategy.
Added to this, Imperial wanted to take advice from Red Oak on how they ranked with other universities using HPC both on-premise and in the cloud. This would enable similarities to be identified, and to learn from Red Oak’s deep experience of the tertiary education and research sectors.
For the AI team ( ) a hybrid approach with the cloud was required to support additional demand and to fulfil short-term access to resources that weren’t available in-house. They required a more interactive experience from resources such as Azure.
Finally, the HPC future journey needed to align fully with Imperial’s target of net zero sustainability by 2040.
The Solution
Red Oak were contracted to help Andrew and his team conduct the exploratory work with academics, to establish current ways of working, and identify new solutions. Red Oak worked across Imperial’s three faculties, and the business school to determine current practices and reported back to the central ICT team.
Andrew and his team had already started to investigate options for suitable on premise cloud platforms and how they could help their peers on this new journey. Red Oak worked to validate that the plans and to help steer the process of decision making around future funding.
This helped Andrew and the ICT department articulate to the faculties that the university was heading in the right direction, and what the key challenges were, particularly around teaching workload.
Red Oak also clarified that Imperial needed to bring the in house HPC up to date and to make it more sustainable.
Red Oak’s consultants conducted a complete audit of opinions, and feasibility into desired options in 2023 for around six months and they provided a 360° report on findings and recommendations.
ICL had some very precise and unique dilemmas that needed addressing. It was clear they had a very good understanding of their current systems, but not so on how it was being used. It has been a delight to work with such a knowledgeable in-house team, and to share our experiences with them to help them to see a clearer picture.” .
Owen Thomas, Red Oak Consulting
The Results
- A strategic report into how the wider community of faculties use, and wish to use, HPC
- A move to direct liquid cooling to make the running of the systems more efficient.
- A move to higher rack densities.
- Deployment of the IX cloud on premise using a piece of Lenovo software to enable a more interactive experience
- Directing the AI community towards the cloud to access things that ICT doesn’t deliver
- The build of some on premise cloud capability for IX to work with HPC technologies in a more interactive way.
- Renewed cloud understanding to address how much to move to the commercial cloud
Red Oak helped us to better understand our own environment, and the needs of the wider university and research sector. We clearly had some internal challenges and needed to get a grip and identify where the major bottlenecks existed, how to manage the clashes between research and teaching and how HPC was being used. It was very important for us to get an independent view on our HPC use and demands, and this helped us shape our future ambitions, direction and sustainability journey.”
Andrew Richards
Imperial College London
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