India’s appetite for high performance computing – ranging from powerful HPC clusters to advanced workstations – continues to grow as an increasing number of companies not only address opportunities within the country, but world wide as well.

Indian enterprises are making their mark in such fields as seismic engineering for oil and gas, aeronautics and defense, automotive design, advanced mathematical modeling, weather forecasting, entertainment, chemical and physical engineering, and manufacturing.

All require advanced computational capabilities and Tyrone, headquartered in Bangalore, is in the forefront of meeting these needs for both the country’s large enterprise and its fast growing small- to medium-sized business sector.

But, as Tyrone’s CEO Sandeep Lodha points out, India’s HPC community is facing a number of challenges.

For example, he notes, “Many HPC users generate tons of data but never organize this data or delete unnecessary data. Needed are massive amounts of low cost storage with a low power footprint. In fact, power is one of our biggest challenges. Large HPC clusters and supercomputers require tremendous amounts of power and cooling. Power is a scarce commodity in India and therefore PUE (Power Usage effectiveness) is extremely important”

Another problem is inadequate Internet access to some regions of the country. This makes it difficult to establish dispersed research facilities that are tied into to their larger counterparts in India’s cities.

Cloud computing is also having trouble making inroads in India because the concept of buying time on a HPC facility is still not accepted – although this is changing. In addition, code modernization – rewriting legacy applications to take advantage of today’s parallel computing systems – is slowing the growth of HPC adoption throughout India.

“For over a decade, we have been helping thousands of companies in India and around the world meet these and other computational challenges by supplying servers and workstations, storage, back-up and HPC and Big Data solutions,” says Lodha.

Servers and workstations

One of the mainstays of Tyrone’s offerings is a line up of nearly 280 workstations and servers. The systems are powered by Intel Xeon processors and Xeon Phi accelerators, GPUs from NVIDIA, and AMD Opteron series processors. Tyrone works with its server and workstation customers to help maximize their ROI and enjoy an out-of-the-box experience by delivering a solution that features advanced components that can scale to meet future needs.

HPC

Tyrone has a long and successful history of HPC solutions in India. For example, in 2013 Netweb Technologies, the Tyrone affiliate that handles all project implementation for Tyrone products in the country, installed India’s largest supercomputer. Built with hybrid technology, the system consists of 224 Intel-based Tyrone servers featuring Xeon processors and Xeon Phi coprocessors.

Tyrone HPC offerings include:

• HPC clusters
• Linux clusters
• Rendering clusters
• GPU optimized computing
• SMP solutions
• HPC management tools

“Although we have our share of large customers using our HPC clusters, our fastest growing sector for these services are small- to medium-sized enterprises,” Lodha says. “They are well aware of the competitive advantages that HPC-based modeling, simulation and analytics can bring.”

HPC in the Cloud

Another fast growing segment of Tyrone’s worldwide offerings is HPC in the cloud – remote computational services provided by Tyrone’s own dedicated clusters or in cooperation with partners such as Amazon. Infiniband connectivity speeds up the transfer of large datasets. Tyrone also offers proximity services, providing workstations and support to customers who want to run their jobs close to the physical HPC cluster.

Comments Lodha, “Our HPC in the cloud solution provides all the benefits of HPC without any of the hassles. Since you don’t own the data center, you don’t have to worry about power and cooling, real estate, and manpower issues. We provide all that as ‘HPC as a Service.’”

Big Data

Recently Tyrone has been involved in a number of Big Data initiatives that make the most of the company’s HPC experience. For example, one of India’s leading telecom service providers worked with Netweb to deploy an Intel-based, fully integrated Hadoop distribution. The implementation helped the telco establish market leadership and enhanced customer satisfaction by providing personalized and contextually relevant offers to their customers.

Storage

Tyrone provides two classes of storage solutions: the FS2 unified flexible storage system; and storage arrays that provide a wide variety of options – from iSCSI to Infiniband.

FS2 is a next generation storage solution that supports HPC and provides excellent results at affordable prices. One of the distinguishing features of this solution is the unification of NAS, SAN and VTL in a single box. This same box can be used as the system scales, lowering customer ROI.

Tyrone’s storage arrays provide a full range of options to meet customer’s specific storage needs. Included are iSCSI, 10GbE iSCSI, Fibre Channel, SAS and JBOD solutions.

The company also provides platforms for easy, cost effective, scalable backup, archive and restore functions.

Global Vision

“Although today our focus is primarily helping large and small- to medium-sized enterprises in India realized the benefits of advanced HPC solutions, we are also moving into the global marketplace,” Lodha says. “HPC and Big Data are a worldwide phenomena and Tyrone and Netweb are positioned to make a major contribution to their growth.”