OSC's Blue Collar Computing effort goes international

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This week the Ohio Supercomputer Center announced that the French consulting computing Sciences Computers Consultants is partnering with the Blue Collar Computing project to bring new applications and expertise to the polymer industry

OSC logoAs part of its Blue Collar Computing offerings, OSC will provide SCC with computational infrastructure and services to test and scale advanced modeling and simulation software for polymer extrusion and mixing on its supercomputers with the intent of developing web portals for polymer industry process modeling.  SCC numerical simulations applications are used by companies in high technology fields within the polymer, energy, automotive and food industries.

SCC has procured from OSC a startup package that consists of 2,500 production-level compute cycles and advanced technical support.  As part of the biannual agreement, SCC will receive up to 150K CPU hours and 250GB of storage per year, as well as 20 user accounts for each project, outside network connectivity and technical support.  SCC intends to install its flagship software product, XimeX, on OSC’s systems for scalability testing and small pilot projects.

The two are now on the lookout, along with trade group PolymerOhio,  for companies in the polymer industry to work with them on a pilot project demonstrating the potential of the partnership.

“Partnering with OSC allows us to develop a significant toehold in the U.S. to answer industrial needs for process analysis and validation, material behavior analysis, and other engineering studies,” said Philippe David, general manager of SCC.

Part of the problem with radically growing the user base for HPC (a move that would transform modern society, inundating it with everything from new drugs to cheap ways to get clean water to sub-Saharan African villages) is that most people’s world view doesn’t include any connection to high performance computing apart from some vague ideas from Jurassic Park. A sensible way to evangelize the solution is to partner with software providers, the people who already know what customers could benefit from HPC, and have them reach out to their customers. Building this partnership enables SCC to not only suggest that HPC might help, but to be able to offer its customers a low-barrier path to computing in a short timeframe.