>> From around the globe,
it's theCUBE,
with digital coverage of VMworld 2020,
brought to you by the VMworld and its ecosystem partners.
>> I'm Stu Miniman,
and welcome back to theCUBES coverage of VMworld 2020,
our 11th year doing this show,
of course, the global virtual event.
And what do we love talking about on theCUBE?
We love talking to customers.
It is a user conference, of course,
so really happy to welcome to the program.
From the University of Pisa,
the Chief Technology Officer Maurizio Davini
and joining him is Thierry Pellegrini,
one of our theCUBE alumni.
He's the vice president of worldwide, I'm sorry,
Workload Solutions and HPC with Dell Technologies.
Thierry, thank you so much for joining us.
>> Thanks too.
>> Thanks to you.
>> Alright, so let, let's start.
The University of Pisa, obviously, you know,
everyone knows Pisa, one of the, you know,
famous city iconic out there.
I know, you know,
we all know things in Europe are a little bit longer
when you talk about, you know,
some of the venerable institutions
here in the United States, yeah.
It's a, you know, it's a couple of hundred years, you know,
how they're using technology and everything.
I have to imagine the University of Pisa
has a long storied history.
So just, if you could start before we dig into all the tech,
give us our audience a little bit, you know,
if they were looking up on Wikipedia,
what's the history of the university?
>> So University of Pisa is one of the oldest in the world
because there has been founded
in one, three, four, three by a pope.
We were authorized to do a university teaching by a pope
during the latest Middle Ages.
So it's really one of the, is not the oldest of course,
but the one of the oldest in the world.
It has a long history, but as never stopped innovating.
So anything in Pisa has always been good for innovating.
So either for the teaching or now for the technology applied
to a remote teaching or a calculation
or scientific computing,
So never stop innovating,
never try to leverage new technologies
and new kind of approach to science and teaching.
>> You know, one of your historical teachers Galileo,
you know, taught at the university.
So, you know, phenomenal history help us understand,
you know, you're the CTO there.
What does that encompass?
How, you know, how many students, you know,
are there certain areas of research
that are done today before we kind of get into the,
you know, the specific use case today?
>> So consider that the University of Pisa
is a campus in the sense that the university faculties
are spread all over the town.
Emilia like Pisa poses a lot of problems
from the infrastructural point of view.
So, we have bought a lot in the past
to try to adapt the Emilia town
to the latest technologies advancement.
Now, we have 50,000 students and consider
that Pisa is a general partners university.
So, we cover science, like we cover letters
in engineering, medicine, and so on.
So, during the, the latest 20 years,
the university has done a lot of effort
to build an infrastructure that was able
to develop and deploy the latest technologies
for the students.
So for example,
we have a private fiber network covering all the town,
65 kilometers of a dark fiber
that belongs to the university,
four data centers, one big and three little center
connected today at 200 gigabit ethernet.
We have a big data centers, big four for Italian University,
of course, and not Poland and U.S. university, where is,
but also hold infrastructure
for the enterprise services and the scientific computing.
>> Yep, Maurizio,
it's great that you've had that technology foundation.
I have to imagine the global pandemic COVID-19
had an impact.
What's it been?
You know,
how's the university dealing with things like work from home
and then, you know, Thierry would love your commentary too.
>> You know, we, of course we were not ready.
So we were eaten by the pandemic and we have
to adapt our service software
to transform from imperson to remote services.
So we did a lot of work, but we are able,
thanks to the technology that we have chosen
to serve almost a 100% of our curriculum studies program.
We did a lot of work in the past to move to virtualization,
to enable our users to work for remote,
either for a workstation or DC
or remote laboratories or remote calculation.
So virtualization has designed in the past our services.
And of course when we were eaten by the pandemic,
we were almost ready to transform our service
from in person to remote.
>> Yeah, I think it's, it's true, like Maurizio said,
nobody really was preparing for this pandemic.
And even for, for Dell Technologies,
it was an interesting transition.
And as you can probably realize a lot of the way
that we connect with customers is in person.
And we've had to transition over to modes
or digitally connecting with customers.
We've also spent a lot of our energy trying
to help the community HPC and AI community
fight the COVID pandemic.
We've made some of our own clusters
that we use in our HPC and AI innovation center
here in Austin available
to genomic research or other companies
that are fighting the the virus.
And it's been an interesting transition.
I can't believe that it's already been over six months now,
but we've found a new normal.
>> Detailed, let's get in specifically
to how you're partnering with Dell.
You've got a strong background in the HPC space,
working with supercomputers.
What is it that you're turning to Dell in their ecosystem
to help the university with?
>> So we are, we have a long history in HPC.
Of course, like you can imagine not to the biggest HPC
like is done in the U.S.
so in the biggest supercomputer center in Europe.
We have several system for doing HPC.
Traditionally, HPC that are based
on a Dell Technologies offer.
We typically host all kind of technology's best,
but now it's available, of course not in a big scale
but in a small, medium scale
that we are offering to our researcher, student.
We have a strong relationship with Dell Technologies
developing together solution
to leverage the latest technologies,
to the scientific computing,
and this has a lot during the research
that has been done during this pandemic.
>> Yeah, and it's true.
I mean, Maurizio is humble,
but every time we have new technologies
that are to be evaluated,
of course we spend time evaluating in our labs,
but we make it a point to share that technology
with Maurizio and the team at the University of Pisa,
That's how we find some of the better usage models
for customers, help tuning some configurations,
whether it's on the processor side, the GPU side,
the storage and the interconnect.
And then the topic of today, of course,
with our partners at VMware,
we've had some really great advancements
Maurizio and the team are
what we call a center of excellence.
We have a few of them across the world
where we have a unique relationship sharing technology
and collaborating on advancement.
And recently Maurizio and the team have even
become one of the VMware certified centers.
So it's a great marriage for this new world
where virtual is becoming the norm.
>> But well, Thierry,
you and I had a conversation to talk earlier in the year
when VMware was really geering their full kind of GPU suite
and, you know, big topic in the keynote, you know, Jensen,
the CEO of Nvidia was up on stage.
VMware was talking a lot about AI solutions
and how this is going to help.
So help us bring us in you work
with a lot of the customers theory.
What is it that this enables for them
and how to, you know, Dell and VMware bring,
bring those solutions to bear?
>> Yes, absolutely.
It's one statistic I'll start with.
Can you believe that only on average,
15 to 20% of GPU are fully utilized?
So, when you think about the amount of technology
that's are at our fingertips
and especially in a world today
where we need that technology
to advance research and scientistic discoveries.
Wouldn't it be fantastic to utilize those GPU's
to the best of our ability?
And it's not just GPU's ,
I think the industry has in the IT world,
leverage virtualization to get to the maximum recycles
for CPU's and storage and networking.
Now you're bringing the GPU in the fold
and you have a perfect utilization
and also flexibility across all those resources.
So what we've seen is that convergence between the IT world
that was highly virtualized,
and then this highly optimized world of HPC and AI
because of the resources out there and researchers,
but also data scientists and company
want to be able to run their day to day activities
on that infrastructure.
But then when they have a big surge need for research
or a data science use that same environment
and then seamlessly move things around workload wise.
>> Yeah, okay I do believe your stat.
You know, the joke we always have is, you know,
anybody from a networking background,
there's no such thing as eliminating a bottleneck,
you just move it.
And if you talk about utilization,
we've been playing the shell game for my entire career of,
let's try to optimize one thing and then, oh,
there's something else that we're not doing.
So,you know, so important.
Retail, I want to hear from your standpoint, you know,
virtualization and HPC, you know, AI type of uses there.
What value does this bring to you and, you know,
and key learnings you've had in your organization?
>> So, we as a university are a big users
of the VMware technologies starting
from the traditional enterprise workload and VPI.
We started from there
in the sense that we have an installation quite significant.
But also almost all the services that the university gives
to our internal users,
either personnel or staff or students.
At a certain point that we decided to try to understand the,
if a VMware virtualization would be good
also for scientific computing.
Why?
Because at the end of the day,
their request that we have from our internal users
is flexibility.
Flexibility in the sense of be fast in deploying,
be fast to reconfiguring,
try to have the latest beats on the software side,
especially on the AI research.
At the end of the day we designed a VMware solution
like you, I can say like a whiteboard.
We have a whiteboard,
and we are able to design a new solution of this whiteboard
and to deploy as fast as possible.
Okay, what we face as IT
is not a request of the maximum performance.
Our researchers ask us for flexibility then,
and want to be able
to have the maximum possible flexibility
in configuring the systems.
How can I say I,
we can deploy as more test cluster
on the visual infrastructure in minutes
or we can use GPU inside the infrastructure tests,
of test of new algorithm for deep learning.
And we can use faster storage inside the virtualization
to see how certain algorithm would vary with
our internal developer can leverage the latest,
the beat in storage like NVME, MVMS or so.
And this is why at the certain point,
we decided to try visualization
as a base for HPC and scientific computing,
and we are happy.
>> Yeah, I think Maurizio described it it's flexibility.
And of course, if you think optimal performance,
you're looking at the bare medal, but in this day and age,
as I stated at the beginning, there's so much technology,
so much infrastructure available
that flexibility at times trump the raw performance.
So, when you have two different research departments,
two different portions,
two different parts of the company
looking for an environment.
No two environments are going to be exactly the same.
So you have to be flexible
in how you aggregate the different components
of the infrastructure.
And then think about today it's actually fantastic.
Maurizio was sharing with me earlier this year,
that at some point, as we all know, there was a lot down.
You could really get into a data center
and move different cables around
or reconfigure servers to have the right ratio
of memory, to CPU, to storage, to accelerators,
and having been at the forefront of this enablement
has really benefited University of Pisa
and given them that flexibility that they really need.
>> Wonderful, well,
Maurizio my understanding, I believe
you're giving a presentation
as part of the activities this week.
Give us a final glimpses to, you know,
what you want your peers to be taking away
from what you've done?
>> What we have done that
is something that is very simple in the sense
that we adapt some open source software
to our infrastructure in order
to enable our system managers and users
to deploy HPC and AI solution fastly
and in an easy way to our VMware infrastructure.
We started doing a sort of POC.
We designed the test infrastructure early this year
and then we go fastly to production
because we had about the results.
And so this is what we present in the sense
that you can have a lot of way to deploy Vitola HPC, Barto.
We went for a simple and open source solution.
Also, thanks to our friends of Dell Technologies
in some parts that enabled us to do the works
and now to go in production.
And that's theory told before you talked to
has a lot during the pandemic
due to the effect that stay at home
>> Wonderful, Thierry, I'll let you have the final word.
What things are you drawing customers to, to really dig in?
Obviously there's a cost savings,
or are there any other things that this unlocks for them?
>> Yeah, I mean, cost savings.
We talked about flexibility.
We talked about utilization.
You don't want to have a lot of infrastructure sitting there
and just waiting for a job to come in once every two months.
And then there's also the world we live in,
and we all live our life here through a video conference,
or at times through the interface of our phone
and being able to have this web based interaction
with a lot of infrastructure.
And at times the best infrastructure in the world,
makes things simpler, easier,
and hopefully bring science
at the finger tip of data scientists
without having to worry
about knowing every single detail
on how to build up that infrastructure.
And with the help of the University of Pisa,
one of our centers of excellence in Europe,
we've been innovating and everything
that's been accomplished for, you know at Pisa
can be accomplished by our customers
and our partners around the world.
>> Thierry, Maurizio, thank you much
for so much for sharing
and congratulations on all I know you've done
building up that COE.
>> Thanks to you.
>> Thank you.
>> Stay with us, lots more covered from VMworld 2020.
I'm Stu Miniman as always.
Thank you for watching the theCUBE.
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