HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING
g
the resources are being consumed. ‘We need to build a picture of the organisation that we can build into a report that can be used to help shape what their next system might look like. It depends on how well the customer feels they understand the requirements and then we kind of go down one of the two approaches.’ Integrators no longer just provide
hardware and support services but increasingly deliver fully managed services. In the future, this may also extend to application support and optimisation. Cloud providers deliver similar hardware and managed service agreements, but it remains to be seen whether they can provide the same level of expertise in HPC-specific applications, hardware and software frameworks. ‘Our business is moving further up the
stack,’ said Dean. ‘We’re initially involved in projects around deploying HPC. Now when we are deploying a system, we typically use our own OCF steel stack that’s based on a number of open source technologies. But in addition to the integration side of things, and support of that, we’re also getting a lot more involved in managed services, and helping to manage those environments. ‘I can see, as time goes on, that we are being asked more specific questions about applications, end-user management and things like that. I can imagine that’s a direction where things are going, that we’re being asked to do more.’ Dean also noted that while this is possible in some centres with a more monolithic application portfolio, many HPC centres have a large set of applications
8 Scientific Computing World Summer 2022
that prohibits optimisation of each one individually by their integrator partner. ‘Some users have hundreds of
applications, so there’s not much point in really spending a lot of time optimising for each application; you’re trying to build something that works for everyone. It’s more on the commercial side of things; we find that users – maybe they’re running
“When it comes to data centres and HPC, the Nordics are relatively cold, and so we take that benefit and make use of it for HPC and AI”
two or three engineering applications, let’s say – and we work closely with them to make sure we’re picking the right hardware initially to make sure we’re getting the best out of that application. There can be other work to help with the workflow side of things as well,’ Dean concluded.
The role of cloud computing At a time when energy prices are soaring and sustainability is becoming an increasingly complex problem for many organisations, data centre provider atNorth is supporting scientists and researchers with its HPC, GPU and AI data centres, which are based on energy- efficient hardware and renewable energy sources with additional heat recovery, improving the cost of delivering highly complex computing services. The Nordic data centre company says it
offers environmentally responsible, power- efficient, cost-optimised data centre hosting facilities and high-performance computing services. It describes its HPC resources as sustainable, highly scalable and fully delivered as a service, enabling scientists and researchers to focus on their applications without having to worry about the underlying HPC infrastructure. atNorth also recently announced the availability of its new GPU-as-a-service (GPUaaS) solution. This new service is aimed at scientists who want to accelerate deep learning, machine learning and HPC workloads that are suitable for large-scale use of GPUs. The company has data centres based in
Iceland and Sweden that are specifically designed and optimised for HPC and AI computing. According to atNorth, these resources are delivered through managed services that can be tailored to meet customer requirements, based on their level of experience and the type of service level agreements (SLA) they require. These managed services can be scaled up or down as necessary to provide general capacity for everyday operations and the ability to cloudburst or quickly scale up operations as needed. Guy D’Hauwers, sales director — HPC and AI, atNorth, commented: ‘The speed at which technology innovation is moving is often incalculable, and much of this is due to digitalisation and the rise of extreme data-hungry applications to fuel the transformation. Today’s data-driven businesses are reinventing the way in which they work and recognise they need a new type of partner that can help them achieve next-generation computing power,
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