One project lead, four specialist partners, one integrated service
Falcon was delivered by four specialist organisations, coordinated end to end by BIOS IT as project lead. Rather than supplying standalone infrastructure components, BIOS IT assembled the consortium, managed the relationships between every partner, and remains the single point of contact for ARCCA throughout the four year contract.
Our Team
BIOS IT
Project lead
Project management, cluster architecture, network configuration, rack integration, physical installation, vendor coordination, platform optimisation, and ongoing collaboration with ARCCA.
"The Cardiff University Falcon Project has been an exciting one to be part of. Bringing the first Supermicro liquid cooled solution to UK academia is something BIOS IT are incredibly proud of, as it showcases our ability to remain at the leading edge of HPC innovation." Alex Putt, Head of UK Research and Academia, BIOS IT.
Supermicro
Ultra low latency, high throughput storage with high bandwidth and IOPS, consistent performance, and seamless scalability.
DDN Lustre provides Falcon's main storage at 1.1PB usable capacity. A DDN IntelliFlash N6200 hybrid platform provides 504TB net usable home storage, optimising data and metadata performance across the cluster.
Compute and cooling
DDN
Storage
Ultra low latency, high throughput storage with high bandwidth and IOPS, consistent performance, and seamless scalability.
DDN Lustre provides Falcon's main storage at 1.1PB usable capacity. A DDN IntelliFlash N6200 hybrid platform provides 504TB net usable home storage, optimising data and metadata performance across the cluster.
ClusterVision
Software
The TrinityX software and management layer, covering analytics, usage accountability, compilers, application profiling and debugging tools.
TrinityX is the layer researchers and ARCCA's team interact with day to day, from job scheduling to usage reporting.
How the consortium works together
BIOS IT sits at the centre of the delivery, coordinating three specialist partners: Supermicro for compute and cooling, DDN for storage, and ClusterVision for the software stack. ARCCA and Cardiff University's IT team sit on the customer side of that relationship, with BIOS IT as their single point of contact throughout.
Why a consortium, not a single vendor
BIOS IT does not resell one vendor's hardware. It designs the right combination of partners for the workload, then owns delivery end to end, from initial design through physical installation and four years of ongoing support. For Cardiff, that meant one point of contact and one set of weekly syncs, not four separate support contracts to manage.