Massive Solutions hopes to encourage the uptake of HPC resources with its high-performance computational service programme, codenamed Virtual Supercomputer (VSC).
Founded in 2007 and headquartered in Prague, Czech Republic, Massive Solutions is a developer of scalable parallel system software for high-performance computing and computational clouds.
This will provide a potential platform for new users of HPC, such as small engineering companies or biotech startups but also provides a way for existing HPC users to scale their existing resources without the huge overheads associated with deploying new racks of servers.
Dmytro Fedyukov, the CEO of Massive Solutions said: ‘We would like to provide HPC resources and expertise to a broader business and academic community to accelerate their research and product development. We believe that the Virtual Supercomputer is more than just a technological platform – it is a tool to democratise the HPC industry. And this is how the concept of eManufacturing will become a reality. We welcome users, datacentres, universities, application developers, and experts to evaluate the beta service and join the partner alliance to make VSC a success.’
The Pros and Cons of virtualisation in HPC have recently been discussed by Deepak Khosla, president of X-ISS Inc, a provider of cross-platform management and analytics solutions to high performance computing.
The service provides secure internet access to high-performance parallel cluster resources and applications on demand. Starting 1 December 2014, registered beta-testers will receive 500 core-hours to run their jobs and evaluate VSC service functionality for free.
Developed by a team of HPC experts, the technology utilises InfiniBand standard and KVM virtualisation technology to provide high performance, scalability, data security and usage flexibility, to meet the needs of commercial and academic users.
The Virtual Supercomputer service platform normally takes minutes to deploy a specific user configuration. This is achieved by a distributed system architecture, where the central core logic servers receive feedback and govern remote VSC appliances. Once deployed to a supercomputer site, the VCS appliance provides spare resource availability reports, 24/7 automation and isolation of dynamically allocated hardware, system data and user data. The VSC platform offers full administrative rights to various scale-parallel clusters. With 'root privileges' users are not only able to manage their VSC clusters over the Internet, upload software and datasets, but to save optimal configurations for later use, significantly minimising redeployment time.
The access to fully configured software instances is provided through the portal's application marketplace. Currently limited to several public domain HPC titles, the VSC marketplace is expected to include commercial applications from vendors interested in developing cloud business.
The open partnership concept allows Massive Solutions to provide a technological platform to HPC sites, software developers and service companies as a tool to offer 3rd-party compute time, applications and services through the Internet.
The VSC beta-test program would help stress-test service platform functionality and optimize portal interface to prepare for the 2015 release of its commercial version. For more information on VSC service, please visit massivesolutions.eu/gobeta.
