Making the HPC lifecycle easier

Last week, I attended the IDC HPC User Forum in the Detroit area. Among the many interesting topics discussed at the Forum was how HPC helps manufacturing firms remain competitive. Large organizations are definitely in leading positions when it comes to HPC. After many years of investment, there is a lot of well established HPC expertise within large companies. IDC data shows the main hurdle for HPC getting penetration beyond those large
organizations is the cost of dealing with complexity of HPC systems. This includes cluster setup and getting applications optimized to take advantage of the latest hardware.

Many HPC vendors provide open source software stacks so that users can avoid hunting down their own components. This helps simplify HPC system setup to a certain degree. However, because many HPC software components are not designed to work together by their nature, users still face the challenge of integrating them to get them work together seamlessly. I talked to many of the attendees of IDC HPC User Forum, and they’ve all spent a tremendous amount of time and effort setting up their HPC environments. Many of them admitted this would be an impossible mission for average manufacturing firms.

With the goal of simplifying HPC cluster life cycle management, Platform’s HPC Suite, which includes HPC Enterprise Edition and HPC Workgroup Edition, provides one-stop shopping for those who don’t have the expertise to deal with the complexity of the HPC system software stack and application integrations. Offered through Platform Computing’s hardware partners, the HPC Suite (or HPC Workgroup Edition) helps average users get applications up and running with optimized performance. The key differentiator of this offering is that it provides the necessary software components to connect the OS to applications in an HPC cluster environment. By working closely with our hardware partners, we’re in the process of certifying he solution and and optimizing it for their specific hardware. With the application integrations, users can start to run parallel applications right away.

For more on the HPC Suite, check our products page here.