BRISTOL, England, Jan. 19 -- EigenForge launches today as a specialist provider of services focused for the High performance Computing (HPC), or Supercomputing, market. It launches with three key service offerings:

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. This is a turn-key fully managed HPC service which will provide considerable cost savings, plus HPC capability for smaller budgets where extra data centre space and costs for extra systems managers are not possible if managed internally.

When a company, university or laboratory procures and manages their own HPC system and infrastructure it is only one of a number of diverse internal service functions. EigenForge offers an expert HPC fully managed service for these organisations to enterprise levels across public and private sectors. In doing so clients will avoid significant delays, enjoy the benefit of enterprise capability and best-of-breed systems, significantly reduce the risk of substantial downtime on a rapidly depreciating asset, and reduce costs in several ways:

• Removes lengthy and separate data centre hurdles, finding resources for additional infrastructure or in the worst case having to build new data centre space.
• Avoid lengthy consultation processes with individual vendors and resellers.
• Avoid increasing staff head-count.
• Avoid retraining and acquiring system familiarity with a new facility.
• Convert Capital Expense to Operational Expense.
• Improve cash-flow by spreading service payments.

One example issue to delay a tendering process is an organisations data centre infrastructure. Reallocating space, installing additional power and cooling capability, or in the extreme case building a whole new data centre, adds significant delay, cost and the opportunity forgone with diminished or zero HPC capability during this period.

"This delay can add months and sometimes years to the procurement process", says EigenForge founder and Principal Dr Jason Hogan-O'Neill. "And then there are the issues of system and data centre facility scalability, writing tenders, and judging vendor tender responses; and having to go through the whole process again in another 36 months".

The fully managed HPC service from EigenForge will immediately remove all of these ancillary issues, improve capacity and change management, allow clients to benefit from focused HPC expertise, and in doing so will accelerate the time to results. Organisations will also improve cash-flow by keeping staff head-count to a minimum, and service payments are divided over a period of time.

2) CPU Brokerage. Sometimes the immediate in-house HPC facilities are exceeded by a burst in demand; a looming deadline, greater simulation resolution, faster rendering. EigenForge will match clients with an excess of HPC resource with those who demand extra capacity to meet intermittent demand. Such short term use is beneficial for:

• "Demand-burst:" demand spikes that saturate internal resources for short periods of time.
• Virtual prototyping: testing a problem on a larger resource to see if it will scale.
• Pre-procurement trials: benchmarking and testing a completely different CPU or filesystem for an organisations next internal purchase.
• Clients who do not have the resources to commit to a large one-off single payment for their own internal system.
• On-demand HPC access as organisations need it.

3) HPC Consultancy. There are a vast number of ancillary issues to consider when procuring or maintaining a live HPC facility. For example, when building and maintaining an internal HPC facility it is valuable to seek an external observer and expert advisor. 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.

"Some organisations actually outgrow their HPC capability during the systems lifetime", adds Dr. Hogan-O'Neill. "System upgrades and additions are a standard offer in the EigenForge Fully Managed HPC Service but for those who need to undertake this on their own internal live systems we can advise on the merits and risk of such a project, and offer a solution".

Live system optimisation and upgrade advice can be provided on the entire HPC ecosystem including high performance filesystems, batch schedulers, numerical libraries, and diagnosing network bottlenecks for example.

To mark the launch of this specialist HPC services company EigenForge is offering two hour and full day 'surgeries' at reduced rates for a limited period.

EigenForge's founder and principal is Dr Jason Hogan-O'Neill who has been using and managing HPC systems since the mid 1990's and has an academic background in condensed matter theoretical physics (superconductivity). After an academic position at the Computational Physics Laboratory in Helsinki, Finland, he has managed several large HPC installations including one of the largest in the European Union at the time of its procurement. After this he joined Silicon Graphics holding technical account manager and technical sales roles with several key clients under his remit. He was also jointly responsible for the successful beta program for SGIs Integrated Cluster Environment (ICE) and sat on the 'x86insider' group within SGI. He has also advised, managed and overseen deployments of Field Programmable Gate Arrays, the Microsoft Windows HPC Server, and some of the largest ICE and Altix shared memory client qualifications and deployments in the UK.

"It is incredibly satisfying when a client contacts you to say you just helped halve or even quarter his code runtime. Or diagnosed and resolved HPC network bottlenecks on a clients facility. This is what it is all about", adds Jason. "It is this zeal and passion for HPC excellence coupled with constant improvement that EigenForge is being founded on".

About EigenForge

EigenForge provides high performance computing services to manufacturing, academia, finance, oil and gas, animation and rendering houses, genome research, and pharmaceutical industries. Its services include:

• Procured, hosted and managed HPC systems and in our data centre facilities.
• Supercomputing brokerage, matching clients who have short supercomputing requirements with facilities with similar short term excess of resource.
• Consultancy on HPC including system optimisation, and appraisals on present methods and future ambitions.

EigenForge Limited is based in the European Union and is a UK registered company. For more information, visit www.eigenforge.com.

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Source: EigenForge