UK-based EigenForge Limited came out of the closet, press release in hand on Monday of this week. EigenForge will focus in three areas of business
1) Fully Managed HPC Service. Following a business and work-flow consultancy review with a potential client, EigenForge will procure, host and manage the clients HPC system in an EigenForge data centre.
2) CPU Brokerage. …EigenForge will match clients with an excess of HPC resource with those who demand extra capacity to meet intermittent demand.
3) HPC Consultancy…Expert and impartial advice on internal infrastructure, data centre appraisals, market reviews, tender writing, and best practices will ensure the fastest and most successful way of starting the procurement process.
This brings together services offered by a number of boutique firms throughout the HPC ecosystem. For example, Parabon (cycle brokering, article at HPCwire this week), NAG (consultancy, article at HPCwire back in August), and Nimbis Services (brokering, consultancy; InsideTrack here), all come to mind. Managing other people’s HPC gear is kind of like traditional colocation, I guess, with the twist that there is a real chance for added value if the colo folks knew anything about HPC.
The founder, Jason Hogan-O’Neill, apparently does know anything about HPC, from a user and sales perspective anyway. He was a user (condensed matter physics), managed HPC centers, and worked pre-sales at SGI.
Does all of this transfer into potentially valuable consulting? Potentially. But successful operations of these petulant beasts is the long product of all kinds of things, many of which one only learns about after decades of finding them, one by one, standing in the middle of a week of downtime on your machines. We’ll have to wait for customers to tell us if there is value here for them. I hope there is…
All of their facilities are in the UK right now, so this looks like a European play for the time being.