Industry is increasingly looking to academic partners for high performance computing resources to power AI, research and development efforts.

“When companies and universities work in tandem to push the frontiers of knowledge, they become a powerful engine for innovation and economic growth.”

That sage observation comes to us from a report by the European Science | Business Innovation Board.
As the report notes, some amazing things have come from industry-academia partnerships.

“Silicon Valley is a dramatic example,” the report says. “For over five decades, a dense web of rich and long-running collaborations in the region have given rise to new technologies at a breakneck pace, and transformed industries while modernising the role of the university.”[1]

Today, this partnering trend is flourishing in the advanced computing space, as businesses increasingly look to universities and their supercomputing centers for access to leading-edge computational resources. There are lots of good reasons for this trend. For starters, businesses can become more competitive by leveraging the cutting-edge ideas and technologies coming out of universities. And they can get there without a lot of risk — the universities and their HPC centers buy, own and manage the equipment, and graduate students can help with R&D work.

This view was underscored in a study conducted by Hyperion Research of behalf of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This study found that found there is a growing trend for academic and other HPC centers to form or expand partnerships with private sector firms, and that both the HPC centers and the industrial partners benefit from the relationships.[2]

Hyperion Research noted that the surveyed industrial enterprises that access publicly supported HPC centers reported a number of business-driven benefits. These include:

• Accelerating the development of competitive products and solutions
• Trying out new methods without having to change production processes
• Learning how to use HPC systems

The surveyed HPC centers, in turn, reported a wide range of benefits, including:

• Unexpected new pathways for science
• Increased motivation and retention of scientific and computational personnel
• Additional revenue for reinvestment in the centers

What we’re talking about here is a classic win-win partnership.

A case study: Norson Design

Norson Design, a full-service boat design operation based in France, is among the companies that have turned to university partners to meet their advanced computing needs. This was the case when the company’s engineers began working on a design for a new high-speed boat.

As a CIO.com article notes, Norson’s engineers wanted to use computational fluid dynamics software to test the complex boundaries between boat, water and air, along with HPC systems to run high-powered simulations. They found this HPC power via a collaboration with Supercomputing Wales and a team of researchers at Swansea University.

For this type of research, supercomputing resources are essential. The more HPC resources, the faster and more accurate the answers you can get. With HPC, researchers can take into account physical properties at an extreme level — such as measuring the phenomena of air and water at a particle level — and then track the results of design modifications. This iterative process is resource-intensive, yet it’s still far more cost effective than building and crashing physical prototypes on the water.

Businesses have a lot to gain from leveraging the resources and expertise of university partners and their HPC centers. Many businesses cannot afford the world-class HPC resources of an organization like Supercomputing Wales. The Intel-based Dell Technologies supercomputer hubs under the Supercomputing Wales umbrella contain more than 13,000 cores, high-speed memory and high-performance storage, all interconnected by low-latency/high-bandwidth networking.

We’re talking about a lot of processing power, a huge amount of storage and really fast networking. And through the power of partnering, it’s all available to the engineers at Norson Design, along with other engineers and researchers from across Wales.

With a bit of inspiration from Helen Keller, someone who accomplished amazing things in her lifetime, this quote of hers says a lot about the power of partnership: “Alone we can do so little, together we can do so much.”

To learn more

To learn more about the HPC resources in use at Supercomputing Wales, see the Dell Technologies case study “World-Class Research.” And to explore some of the key technologies for HPC-driven research in industrial and academic use cases, visit DellTechnologies.com/HPC.

[1] Science | Business Innovation Board, “Making Industry-University Partnerships Work,” 2012.

[2] Hyperion Research, “Worldwide Best Practices in Partnerships between HPC Centers and Industrial Users,” sponsored by National Center for Supercomputing Applications,” July 2017.