Electronics Research Institute becomes a research hub in Egypt

By providing cloud services such as IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS, ERI serves the Egyptian academic community. ERI is becoming a hub for the research community in Egypt, who are able to leverage ERI’s state of the art cloud-based technologies. Scientists can easily access high performance infrastructure and completely customise their execution environment, thus providing the perfect setup for their experiments.

The Institute also provides an HPC platform to support research in areas such as weather forecasting, microwave design, photovoltaic applications, and seismic data processing.

ERI has chosen Bright technologies to manage its HPC, cloud and big data infrastructure. The project has been delivered by Brightskies Technologies, who joined the Bright Computing partner programme in October 2015.

Brightskies Technologies has implemented Bright Cluster Manager 7.2 to manage ERI’s HPC environment; Bright OpenStack to provide cloud services such as IaaS, PaaS, SaaS; and Bright Cluster Manager for Big Data to manage its Hadoop and big data workloads.

The company is a premier service provider in the areas of Cloud Computing and High Performance Computing, with focus on cluster administration and code modernisation services. Brightskies Technologies has also been nominated as one of the top 20 most promising HPC solution providers worldwide.

In the HPC environment, ERI is using a mix of Intel Xeon CPUs and Xeon phi accelerators configured for offload processing, submitting parallel jobs using SLURM job scheduler. Brightskies has provided ERI researchers with code optimisation support and training on Intel tools to modernise their codes and maximise use of available resources.

Professor Dr Hesham Eldeeb, ERI’s General Manager, commented: “ERI works hard to maintain its position as the leading centre for HPC and cloud academic research in Egypt.

Professor Dr Salwa Nassar, ERI’s Cloud Computing and HPC Program Director, added: “The ground-breaking solution from Brightskies, coupled with Bright’s infrastructure management technology, gives scientists in our region a state-of-the-art platform to push the boundaries of high performance computing.”

Dr Khaled Elamrawi, President of Brightskies Technologies, commented: “Using Bright Computing’s technologies, we were able to showcase how to provision a virtual HPC cluster or big data cluster over cloud as extensions to the existing cluster or on demand as per users’ requests.” He added that this was very powerful and clearly addressed the challenges that ERI were facing.

Lee Carter, VP EMEA at Bright Computing, added, when customers combine the technologies to manage their hybrid infrastructure from a single pane of glass, the sheer power of Bright really comes to the fore. “I’m delighted that Brightskies has delivered this solution and that ERI is benefiting from our holistic management interface.”