When supercomputing and AI meets the cloud
The Irish Centre for High-End Computing (ICHEC) is preparing for the installation of a new national supercomputer which will also be accessible via the cloud to researchers across Ireland.
Linux-based cloud and high-performance computing company Penguin Computing is one of the companies involved with the project along with Intel. ZDNet talked to Penguin CEO Tom Coull to find out more.
ZDNet: Tell me a little about your company.
Coull: We are a platform and performance scale-out company and we have been around for almost 20 years. We’re based in Fremont, California, and we have manufacturing here.
We got into performance computing in 2003, with the acquisition of a software company that gave us the software to be able to support Beowulf-style clusters. That was Scyld Software, and, in fact, our software is under the brand name of Scyld.
We then went into the high-performance computing (HPC) market. We were initially a Linux server company and had really gone into business to provide LAMP [Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP] servers back in 1999 when that was really a growing part of the IT landscape.
You can think of our business as two-thirds high-performance computing and one-third datacentre scale-out. We also have a high-performance computing cloud called POD (Penguin Computing On Demand).
POD plays an important role here and it’s good to know we have this special, high-performance cloud.
Then we were acquired about three months ago by SMART Global Holdings, which is a public company.
More specifically, we’ve partnered with Intel to provide a supercomputer for ICHEC. It’s just in the process of installation — our team flew over to Ireland and we started installation last week.
It’s an interesting system. You can think of it as a mirror image of our current platform. It is an Intel Xeon-based topology, but it also runs a virtualised front-end, which is the same thing that we do for our POD.
It provides an on-demand, user space where people can have their own log-in nodes that can run virtual desktops to be able to do per-input processing. And that is interfaced back to the actual supercomputer which runs bare metal. There is a job scheduler that runs the jobs out onto that platform.
The aim is to be able to provide a really broad offering for ICHEC’s users and customers. The cloud platform that we provide — both as a service and as a product — allows them to do that.
The product is called Skilled Cloud Manager and it uses a virtual desktop technology called Skilled Cloud Workstation which gives you either a Windows or a Linux interface, depending on the devices that you happen to have over the Internet and it links back into the supercomputer.
You must have all kinds of customers from all kinds of industry running these systems?
That’s exactly right. The most common are customers that generally have applications that scale out. They run at scale and they need a hardware platform to run at scale. You can’t really run these applications on any meaningful scale on a virtualised environment like the more typical public clouds.
A lot of weather modelling, structural analysis, computational fluid dynamics and the other typical modelling outfits that are out there.
A lot of custom code is run on these systems along with a lot of AI which is a really fast-growing area of computing.
AI must be becoming a very important area?
It really is. It is still in the early stages; a lot of our customers are really in the research mode. But we have a lot of federal business as well, not only in the US but around the world including the UK. And a lot of other areas where there are a lot of intelligence programs going on and where they have been using AI for quite a while.
Those are continuing to grow but we are seeing a lot going on with autonomous vehicles — a lot to do with feature extraction from images and from video.
