Case Study: University of Cambridge accelerates scientific discovery and enables data‑centric AI research with Dell Technologies

Researchers capitalize on the UK’s largest academic supercomputer with the world’s fastest HPC storage system to power data-driven science

The University of Cambridge required a high-performance computing and data storage platform to tackle large-scale, data-driven simulation and AI challenges. Working with Dell Technologies, the university deployed the Cumulus–UK Science Cloud built on Dell EMC PowerEdge servers, Intel Xeon processors, OpenStack and other open-source tools to make supercomputing resources cloud-accessible to academic and industrial researchers.

Dell Technologies implemented a Data Accelerator (DAC) architecture using Dell EMC PowerEdge R740xd servers with NVMe SSDs and high-speed Intel/Mellanox interconnects to pre-stage hot data on fast storage nodes. The solution delivers record storage performance (up to 500 GB/sec and multi‑million IOPS) and multi‑petaflop compute capacity (Cumulus: 3.8 petaflops, ~74,000 cores), enabling faster AI, genomics and astronomy workloads, broader researcher access, and measurable acceleration of scientific discovery.

University of Cambridge

Paul Calleja

Director of Research Computing Services