Scaling science: How we helped an aerospace customer 15x their HPC cluster through managed services
Challenge
A customer wanted to scale their HPC installation after their initial research phase was completed. Despite staffing top-tier scientists, no one on their team could actually stand up the infrastructure. The scientists were told, “You’re smart, you can figure this out.” Six months later, they had not. This resulted in long simulation run times, high network latency, and $MMs in unnecessary cloud charges.
Solution
- Implementing a fully-managed “it just works” services environment allowed scientists to simply submit their jobs without worrying about infrastructure configuration.
- Pre-configured remote simulation environments empowered less technical staff to use well-configured machines with minimal effort.
- Working within a managed environment freed the scientists to focus on their primary objectives and be much more productive.
Results
- Transitioning to the managed services environment allowed the science team to focus on doing their best work and scale up rapidly
- Once the infrastructure was properly configured, the CFD cluster scaled up massively: from a small (40 nodes) on-prem stack to a fully cloud-based 600-node HPC farm
- Infrastructure improvements and software optimization allowed the customer to scale to $MMs in monthly spend after efficient utilization was achieved
Switching to a managed services environment for their HPC cluster allowed the customer’s top-shelf science team to focus on doing their best work. Any worries about network configurations, vendor support relationships, and software licenses faded into the background with ISC’s managed services.
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