HPCwire: Industries Tap IBM's Deep Computing Capacity on Demand

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November 04, 2005

Industries Tap IBM's Deep Computing Capacity on Demand

Through IBM's Deep Computing Capacity on Demand (DCCoD) offering, four new commercial applications are leveraging Blue Gene and additional HPC cluster systems to solve problems in supply chain, digital animation, life sciences and automotive design. SmartOps Corp., RenderRocket LLC, QuantumBio Inc. and Exa Corp. are partnering with IBM to spur development and drive innovation in their respective industries.

DCCoD is a utility computing service that provides clients with access to IBM supercomputing infrastructure. It enables modest-sized organizations, or those with peak computing demands, to buy capacity on IBM's HPC resources.

"We are giving customers access to supercomputing power once available only to the corporations with the deepest pockets," said David Gelardi, vice president for Deep Computing Capacity on Demand at IBM. "Clients who need the analytic capability of super-high performance computers can now simply rent time on Blue Gene to run these specialized applications and achieve results never before attainable."

Examples of the work taking place at the Deep Computing Capacity on Demand centers include:

Supply Chain Management
- SmartOps, a provider of enterprise-class supply chain optimization solutions for the manufacturing and distribution industries, is using IBM's Blue Gene DCCoD Center to provide customers with flexibility and scalability for deploying supply chain optimization solutions.
- SmartOps' Multi-stage Inventory Planning and Optimization solution allows customers, such as Caterpillar and Deere in manufacturing, and Cardinal Health in distribution, to improve their order fulfillment and inventory asset management. By accessing IBM's Blue Gene, SmartOps reduces processing time from hours to seconds. It also allows SmartOps to enable large-scale customers to run dozens of optimization scenarios on real production data in minutes, allowing a sense-and-respond capability in supply chain management.
- "Our selection of IBM's DCCoD was based on a commitment to provide our customers with choices that offer the greatest value, from ease of implementation to industry leading scalability," said Sridhar Tayur, CEO of SmartOps. "IBM's range of computing platforms including servers, clusters, and Blue Gene On Demand provides an unparalleled level of choice and service and enables our customers to have confidence in the reliability and scalability of their supply chain systems. We are confident in IBM's products and services."
Animation Rendering
- RenderRocket, a remote 3-D rendering services company, now enables its customers to have access to rendering power 24 hours a day over the internet. By combining DCCoD computing power and RenderRocket's render job launching and monitoring tools, customers have access to the 3-D computing power.
- Customers have the ability to tap into remote rendering power without tying up local workstations or building expensive local server farms that may only be used a small fraction of the time. DCCoD enables the company to provide an advanced rendering platform. For example, a minute and a half of animation for television render may take up to 10 days to do on a company's local rendering servers. With RenderRocket, that same job can be turned around in a few hours, leaving time for revisions, enabling the creative process.
Life Sciences
- QuantumBio is a provider of software tools for drug, biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies. It relies on IBM's DCCoD center in Rochester, Minn., to provide on-demand use of its 5.7 teraflop system, to fulfill its computing power needs. QuantumBio sells its applications in a utility model -- installing a Blue Gene system in-house to host its customers' drug simulations would have a startup costs of around $2 million. A secure VPN provides QuantumBio customers with access to the utility.
- Through the partnership with IBM, QuantumBio is able to provide users with the opportunity to study molecules of interest over a secure and integrated system on an as-needed or on-demand basis. To date, QuantumBio has completed the development of its software on a number of IBM platforms, including the pSeries, xSeries, and finally the massively parallel supercomputer: BlueGene/L.
Automotive Design and Analysis
- Exa, a provider of computer-aided engineering simulation, analysis and design optimization products and services, is tapping into IBM's DCCoD center in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., to gain access to capacity for its customers.
- Exa provides computer-aided design software for the automotive industry that can enable them to build aerodynamic vehicles. Exa now has the ability to cater to its customers quickly without accruing additional overhead cost.
- Currently, as many as 40 percent of Exa's customers tap into the IBM Deep Computing Capacity on Demand center for access to Exa's software with capacity demands averaging in the tens of thousands of CPU hours per major engineering simulation project.

IBM's DCCoD centers in Poughkeepsie and the European-based center in Montpellier, France, can be accessed by customers worldwide via a secure VPN connection over the Internet. As available, clients can have on-demand access to more than 5,200 CPUs of Intel, AMD Opteron and IBM Power technology based compute power to run the Linux, Microsoft Windows and IBM AIX operating environments. The newest center in Rochester, Minn., brings more than 2,000 CPUs of IBM PowerPC-based Blue Gene technology to run Linux-based workloads.

IBM has indicated that demand for DCCoD resources doubled between 2004 and 2005 and is expected to double again by 2006. In light of this, IBM is looking at allocating more HPC infrastructure and possibly opening new DCCoD centers.

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