As the cloud becomes more ubiquitous in the enterprise, it is addressing more and more aspects of the business. One of the last on-premise strongholds has been around an organization’s core IP. Adding cloud-based solutions for engineers is inevitable. However, once IT management decides the project makes sense, actually configuring HPC cloud simulation services is quite complicated. Whereas most cloud applications handle myriads of small transactions, cloud-based simulation addresses a relatively low transaction count with very large problems. More specifically, these are tightly coupled equations in enormous matrices that will be solved across a virtualized compute cluster with high-speed communication protocols. Furthermore, HPC cloud simulation solutions are tuned and optimized to this niche workload.
At UberCloud, we have found that the most effective way to provision HPC resources on Microsoft Azure is to use a tool called Azure CycleCloud. CycleCloud is a subscription benefit for Azure users. IT administrators configure cluster templates for specific engineering simulation applications. Engineers can then launch those templatized clusters on demand to address the present simulations. This automation lifts an enormous burden from IT’s shoulders. Quotas can also be set so that users get warnings if they get carried away with burning through an allocated budget.
The user experience for the engineer is all through a GUI, no coding required. This means that new engineers can be on-boarded fairly quickly and cannot get themselves into too much trouble. In CycleCloud, there will be an icon for each of their engineering simulation applications. This should be familiar to users as it is quite similar to the app store for their iOS or Android devices. The objective is to get the engineers focused on scaling their simulations as quickly as possible, instead of training them to be amateur coders.
Now that we understand Azure CycleCloud’s role, how does IT get the shiny icons for the engineering department’s favorite simulation tools? That’s where UberCloud’s expertise comes in. Our team has poured blood, sweat, and tears into creating easily deployable icons for you to insert in your Azure CycleCloud environment. We have configured all the necessary drivers, libraries, installation packages, and networking to run engineering simulations at scale. The final product is that IT gets to focus more on cloud strategy and spend less time stumbling on nuanced HPC challenges in the engineering tools themselves.
To learn more about our solutions, please contact us.