The company announced a trio of universities would adopt Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Network solutions for some of their computing needs.
Wake Forest University, the University of Washington, and Vanderbilt University have all signed on to use Red Hat in their computing environments. Red Hat announced those schools were among several that have chosen Red Hat’s Linux distribution and support services for their environments.
Wake Forest opted for Red Hat when it came to building a high-performance computing cluster, as well as supporting some mission-critical applications. One of those applications, Program Link, is coming to the end of a three-year effort to build a cornerstone of Wake’s initiative for a wholly integrated digital campus.
“The University has an extensive collection of computing facilities that serve both academic and business needs,” said Jay Dominick, Assistant Vice President for Information Systems and Chief Information Officer, Wake Forest University. “Red Hat has played a critical role in the upgrade of our information infrastructureThe advantages for us in terms of support, availability and disaster recovery are substantial.”
The University of Washington operates the Center for Computational Biomechanics. Their use of Red Hat to bolster research projects at the Center with a high-performance computing cluster delivered some highly scalable performance increases.
For example, the Center could model a car crash in twelve hours under its former system. Using Red Hat, they have pushed that time down to about one hour to compute the results.
“The implementation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux gives our students the luxury of high performance computing, which, through the full integration of multi-host access, drastically cuts down on stress levels and saves the center time, money and resources while facilitating research discoveries,” said David J. Nuckley, Ph.D., Research Assistant Professor in the University of Washington’s Department of Mechanical Engineering.
At Vanderbilt, Red Hat displaced HP-UX and the rapidly aging HP3000 mainframes with Linux and Intel hardware choices. Data storage needs increased 1,000 percent per year according to Red Hat, and the HP mainframes were not keeping pace.
Considering Intel/Linux versus a new HP system indicated a 60 percent savings for Vanderbilt by opting for Red Hat. “It’s a huge bargain, and when we considered the added benefits of Red Hat’s support assistance with patching, security and the RHN GUI console, we felt we had everything to gain and very little to lose. Ultimately it’s about performance and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO),” said Kevin McDonald, Program Manager for System Administration at Vanderbilt.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
