Government

As a member of the technical staff of a government research agency, you focus on huge problems that are beyond the scope of any one company or university. That’s why your sector dominates the use of supercomputers. Previously, major advances in technology would appear first in proprietary SMP machines; now the forefront of activity is in commodity hardware. Factor in public oversight of budgets and it’s logical that cost-effective Linux HPC clusters are an obvious choice for your organization.

As you collaborate with scientific and commercial partners, you need state-of-the-art tools to simulate particular problems, build on proven algorithms, or develop new approaches. Using advanced laboratory facilities, colleagues conduct real time experiments. To analyze the results, you run large simulations and model validation against experimental measurements. Your applications are CPU intensive and a typical baseline case has a run time of a week or two. More complex jobs can take 6-8 weeks. The data sets are enormous. Other researchers at related agencies and partner companies want access to your results.

You’re probably forced to compete for resources at government supercomputing centers. Demand always exceeds supply and it’s common for groups to have difficulty obtaining access in a timely fashion for all of the simulations they wished to run. Clusters can help you meet a variety of challenges:

• Computational power
• Greater access to computational resources
• Dynamic presentation of results to remote audiences
• Cost-effective systems that can be upgraded and expanded incrementally

If you’re an IT professional, your HPC users will rely on you to support departmental installations. Tools that can give system administrators added capabilities for application installation and provisioning will make life much easier for everyone.

As part of your vendor evaluation, our Penguin engineers will help you benchmark the performance of your specific applications and problems on our equipment. Our Professional Services Group can support you through installation, shakedown and on-going provisioning.