This sponsored post from Bill Magro, chief technologist for HPC, and HPC solutions lead at Intel Corp., explores how Intel, OEMs, systems integrators, and ISVs partner to reduce deployment barriers through pre-configured and validated HPC systems. Simulation and modeling are key.
Intel Select Solutions for Simulation & Modeling feature pre-configured, tested, and validated systems that offer a turnkey path to HPC implementation. (Photo: Intel)
HPC clusters used for simulation and modeling today in government, academic, and corporate institutions drive scientific discovery and engineering innovation. However, those systems also represent complex investments in hardware, software and personnel. From a hardware perspective, organizations must choose among various CPUs, networking fabric options, and memory configurations to identify those which best meet their requirements.
The software selection process has its own set of complexities. Since different HPC users may have unique application needs, installing a standard Linux distribution may not offer the platform versatility needed for a specialized HPC environment.
Staffing represents a third consideration. Large organizations typically hire dedicated staff with the knowledge to select, obtain, and deploy HPC systems. Without access to these experts, though, smaller organizations face barriers in the path toward HPC, even though they recognize the long-term value it can bring.
To address these challenges, Intel partnered with systems integrators, industry OEMs, and application vendors to create less-complicated HPC solutions. The resulting effort led to Intel Select Solutions for Simulation & Modeling.
Ready when you are
Intel Select Solutions for Simulation & Modeling feature pre-configured, tested, and validated systems that offer a turnkey path to HPC implementation. Partner systems integrators are able to simplify system development and delivery, easing the process of system selection and deployment for customers. With simplification comes speed: because integrators start with pre-validated, compatible configurations, systems can be deployed very quickly than before. Further, customizations also proceed quickly when they start from a known good configuration. The result is a faster path to deploy and use the latest HPC technologies.
Broad application compatibility
Most HPC systems don’t run a single application; instead, they run multiple applications, often as part of complex workflows. To achieve the broadest application compatibility, Intel works with major independent software vendors (ISVs) to identify the system requirements of a wide range of popular simulation and modeling applications. By combining industry standards with the common needs of ISV applications, we were able to create a base HPC platform definition that enables system vendors to build solutions that achieve broad application compatibility. All Intel Select Solutions for Simulation & Modeling meet these requirements. This makes it easy to select a solution with confidence, knowing it will run a wide range of applications now and over time.
Beyond compatibility, Intel Select Solutions for Simulation & Modeling are workload optimized, featuring the latest Intel Xeon Scalable processors, memory, and storage, along with Intel’s highly optimized performance libraries and parallel runtime libraries.
Empowering converged workflows
While simulation and modeling are the familiar workhorses of HPC, the field is rapidly changing. Organizations are beginning to combine simulation and modeling workloads with other workloads like artificial intelligence, and they are increasingly turning to data analytics and high-fidelity visualization to gain insights from large, complex data sets. These new workloads are becoming part of an increasingly complex workflow, demanding that simulation and modeling, analytics, AI, and visualization all co-exist on a common, high-performance system.
Intel Select Solutions for Simulation & Modeling provides the base platform on which a whole family of Select Solutions for HPC is built. This family includes Intel Select Solutions for Professional Visualization, Intel Select Solutions for HPC & AI Converged Clusters [Magpie], Intel Select Solutions for HPC & AI Converged Clusters [Univa], Intel Select Solutions for Genomics Analytics, and more. This common architecture makes it possible to start with a simulation and modeling solution but easily its capabilities over time to handle increasingly-complex workflows.
Find more information about ways Intel Select Solutions for Simulation & Modeling can jumpstart your organization.
Bill Magro is Chief Technologist for HPC and HPC Solutions Lead at Intel Corp.
