HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING
Maximising the value of HPC
INTEGRATORS AND CLOUD PROVIDERS HELP FACILITATE ACCESS TO HPC AND DELIVER ADDITIONAL EXPERTISE AND SUPPORT, WHICH HELPS SCIENTISTS TO EFFECTIVELY USE COMPUTING RESOURCES, FINDS ROBERT ROE
HPC integrators can help scientists and researchers to access and manage their high
performance computing (HPC) resources to get the most out of their computing infrastructure. Increasingly, this includes hybrid cloud environments and managed services, which also help to support the upkeep and usability of the systems. But for the service provider to
determine the right level of support for each organisation requires knowledge of the existing stack, the use application portfolio and the level of expertise of the user community
Andy Dean, sales director at OCF,
commented: ‘It depends on how mature their usage of HPC is within that specific customer. So if somebody has been using HPC for a number of years, this could be the second, third, fourth iteration of the HPC environment; they tend to have a very good understanding of the workload they’ve got.’ Dean described how mature users can
fall into two further categories. Users with a specific small set of applications want to maximise the performance of those key applications. ‘In that scenario, it becomes a conversation about how do we achieve their performance requirements – if they have requirements for how quickly they want to run a model, for example,’ said Dean. Alternatively, there could be wide and
varied workloads where the customer wants to try and provide a balanced
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infrastructure that meets a wide number of requirements, but potentially is less specialised than a system focused on just a handful of applications. ‘Or maybe they’ve got a very varied workload,’ Dean added. ‘Then we might look at how we will build an environment to try and keep all of the users happy. In that scenario, you want to deliver a balanced environment that works for the largest number of users.’ When the customer or its user
community are new to HPC, then engagement focuses on understanding the application portfolio and how the users intend to make use of the HPC resources. ‘Other potential customers are very new to HPC, or really looking to expand their environment and aren’t necessarily in a position to understand precisely what all of their users are after and what they require,’ noted Dean. ‘For
“Other potential customers are very new to HPC, or really looking to expand their environment and aren’t necessarily in a position to understand precisely what all of their users are after”
those kinds of customers, it can be more like an interview-type process that’s more of a consultancy engagement, rather than a technical pre-sales engagement.’ Dean states that it is important to
understand exactly what the users currently have access to and how
Summer 2022 Scientific Computing World g 7
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