Building a multi-vendor cloud HPC solution at Punch Torino
PUNCH Torino, an engineering company specializing in designing and developing innovative propulsion systems and control solutions, needed to build a new HPC platform following a change of ownership. Rather than establish an on-prem cluster for their organization, the HPC team at PUNCH chose to partner with Altair and create an agile multi-vendor cloud architecture. They chose Altair for our broad and deep understanding of a range of technical knowledge and the cloud-vendor agnostic capabilities of our cloud bursting tools. It was also critical that the solution was built quickly so needed a cloud that worked out of the box as far as possible.
The circumstances that lead to organizations adopting a multi-cloud approach are as complex and varied as the environments they reflect: acquiring companies or being acquired; taking advantage of different technology vendors offer; the list goes on. Cloud technologies drives limitless opportunity, and having access to multiple clouds lets users avoid vendor lock-in. Moreover, using cloud technology, and being smart about the cost, enables organizations to avoid the exorbitant expense of setting up brand new HPC systems from scratch.
Fortunately, our suite of solutions easily addresses the complexity of these environments. Our customers trust workload managers like Altair® PBS Professional® to work with Altair® Control™, a cluster configuration and reporting manager, and Altair® Access™, which is a simple job submission portal for remote clusters. These tools, along with others from Altair, empower our customers to achieve breakthrough results.
Together, the team at PUNCH worked with Altair to plan, implement, and configure the new HPC cloud architecture. The collaboration required detailed planning and precise timing to pull together all the elements of the new infrastructure and optimize its performance without impacting users’ work. Using PBS Professional for its workload management and cloud bursting, combined with Control for its detailed reporting and configuration management and Access for job submission, the partnership leveled a solution perfectly oriented to address PUNCH’s unique multi-cloud environment. The solution was designed to take advantage of cloud offerings from Oracle Cloud, AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.
“By partnering with Altair, we implemented a brand new HPC cloud architecture in just a few weeks without impacting users’ work. The new infrastructure enables our team to get critical engineering work done quickly and efficiently without the headaches of operating an on-premises data center.” - Mauro Bighi, CIO PUNCH Group
Check out the full customer story for more detail and be sure to watch PUNCH Torino’s Future.HPC 2022 presentation “HPC at Punch Torino: A Partnership Story with Altair” to hear how Altair and PUNCH boosted productivity with intuitive HPC tools.