R&D teams rely heavily on High Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure to run various product design simulations (such as Computational Fluid Dynamics, Material Science).
Accelerating Innovation requires frictionless access to the best simulation tools and computing infrastructure.
On the other hand, IT requires the ability to centrally govern and manage HPC infrastructure to deliver a seamless experience to R&D teams and yet remain in control. However, current HPC experience at the enterprises come with a number of challenges for both R&D teams and IT.
Challenges faced by R&D Teams
Lack of user friendly HPC Access
R&D teams often lack HPC expertise and need a simple, user-friendly interface to submit and manage their jobs. They are often exposed to the underlying HPC infrastructure, go through steep learning curves and need IT support to track and manage their jobs.
Slow Experimentation and Iteration Cycles
R&D teams rely on traditional, on-premise HPC clusters that have capacity constraints and limited scalability leading to long simulation run times and slower experimentation cycles
Data Management & Collaboration
R&D teams generate vast amounts of simulation data leading to complexities in data management. Delivering successful R&D projects requires seamless collaboration between different stakeholders spread across globally distributed teams.
Challenges faced by IT Teams
Infrastructure Scalability & Capacity Constraints
On-premises HPC systems have capacity constraints limiting scalability during peak usage periods. IT is often unable to meet the growing demands of R&D teams to run faster simulations and iteration cycles to accelerate product innovation.
HPC Governance
IT teams lack visibility of how HPC infrastructure is utilized across different R&D teams. They often struggle to understand how HPC resources are utilized and are unable to ensure fair usage of available resources across R&D teams.
HPC Cost Management
IT administrators need a system to allocate budgets and track costs to ensure that R&D teams receive a fair share of the infrastructure while staying within budget. This is crucial as R&D organizations have specific budgets for their R&D projects.
Software & License Management
IT teams struggle with managing, updating and distributing different software tools required by engineering teams. They also struggle with visibility and integrations of licenses into HPC workflows.
What is Tachyon?
Tachyon is a self-service HPC platform designed by Invisibl Cloud to streamline the management and utilization of HPC resources on the cloud. It provides a unified interface for researchers, engineers, and IT teams to run complex simulations, manage workloads, and monitor performance—all without the typical complexities associated with HPC environments.
Using Tachyon, researchers can
- Submit jobs via a simple user interface.
- Monitor the jobs and perform troubleshooting using the unified observability and logs features.
- Manage their input/output data used for the simulations through a simple file manager interface.
- Request and launch remote workstations in a self-service manner without any IT intervention.
IT teams can
- Centrally manage HPC infrastructure across multiple Cloud accounts and regions.
- Create budgets across project teams down to the user level and control spending.
- Access fine-grained spending information using a simplified dashboard interface.
- Ensure compute resources are allocated fairly to researchers using governance policies.
- Monitor the infrastructure through a unified observability interface.
Key Features
Job Submission and Monitoring
With Tachyon, users can submit jobs to the HPC clusters and monitor their progress through a single pane of glass. The platform provides real-time visibility into job execution, enabling researchers to track the status of their simulations and troubleshoot issues quickly using integrated logs and metrics.
Workstation Machine Catalog
Tachyon features a custom machine catalog that allows users to launch remote workstations with varying compute capacities. The IT team can create new machine catalogs in various OS flavours with pre-installed application software that are applicable for different R&D use cases performed by the researchers. The IT admin can also control the type/capacity of the compute resource used for the remote workstations. This flexibility ensures that researchers can select the appropriate resources for their specific tasks, optimizing both performance and cost.
Budget and Spend Board
The platform allows IT admins to create budgets across departments, projects and to the user level. The budget setup helps in controlling the spending by checking the availability of budget when the researchers run their simulations. The jobs can be submitted to the HPC system only if the project or the user has enough budget available to them.
Tachyon provides detailed insights into HPC spending, allowing organizations to track costs in real-time. The budget and spend board feature helps teams monitor expenditures at various levels—project, cluster, partition, and user—enabling continuous cost optimization and preventing overspending.
Unified Observability
The platform offers unified observability, integrating monitoring tools into a single interface. This feature simplifies troubleshooting by providing comprehensive insights into cluster health, resource utilization, and workload performance, ensuring that issues are identified and resolved quickly.
File Manager
Tachyon’s file manager enables users to manage input and output files directly within the platform. It also supports file sharing among colleagues, facilitating collaboration and ensuring that all team members have access to the necessary data for their projects.
Quality of Service (QOS)
The platform’s QOS policies help maintain consistent performance across HPC environments. Tachyon’s policy-driven governance ensures that resources are allocated according to organizational priorities, preventing non-compliant resource usage and ensuring that critical tasks receive the necessary computational power.
Policy-Driven Governance
Tachyon’s governance framework is policy-driven, allowing organizations to enforce compliance across all HPC resources. Policies can be set at the cluster, partition, and user levels, ensuring that all activities adhere to organizational standards and regulatory requirements.
Reports
Tachyon offers comprehensive reporting capabilities, allowing users to generate detailed reports on job execution, resource utilization, and budget compliance. These reports can be viewed and downloaded on demand, providing valuable insights for decision-making and continuous improvement.
Application and Infrastructure Alerts
The platform provides customizable alerts for both application and infrastructure events. Users can set thresholds for resource usage, job failures, and other critical metrics, ensuring that they are immediately notified of any issues that may impact performance or compliance.
Security – Access Control and Data
Tachyon enhances security through role-based access control (RBAC) and data encryption. The platform ensures that only authorized users can access sensitive data and HPC resources, providing a secure environment for research and development activities.
Create and Manage Clusters
Tachyon simplifies the process of creating and managing HPC clusters by providing a user-friendly interface that abstracts the complexities of cloud infrastructure. This feature allows platform teams to standardize HPC infrastructure across all teams, ensuring consistency and compliance while reducing the need for specialized cloud expertise.
Queue Management
Tachyon offers dynamic queue management, enabling users to efficiently handle various computational workloads. The platform allows for the setup of queues that cater to different use cases, ensuring optimal resource allocation and reducing wait times for simulations and computational tasks.
License-Aware Scheduling and Monitoring
Tachyon incorporates license-aware scheduling, ensuring that software licenses are used efficiently. The platform monitors license usage, preventing overconsumption and ensuring that resources are available when needed without exceeding licensing agreements.
Key Benefits
Accelerated Research
With Tachyon, researchers’ productivity can increase up to 5 times as they do not have to wait for compute resources and also can provision the required resources in a self-service manner with no IT intervention. The self-service nature and the ability to decide when the users would want to run their simulation jobs, enhances their productivity and hence speeds up the research process.
Cost Efficiency
By leveraging cloud infrastructure, Tachyon can reduce research costs by 60%, offering significant savings compared to traditional on-premises HPC setups.
Increased Productivity
The platform enables a tenfold increase in research productivity by providing immediate access to HPC resources and reducing the overhead associated with managing these environments.
Seamless Integration with Existing Workflows
One of Tachyon’s standout features is its ability to integrate seamlessly with existing HPC workflows. Whether you are running simulations using ANSYS or PowerFLOW, Tachyon handles the infrastructure, allowing you to focus on your research. The platform supports multiple workload managers, including SLURM, and offers dynamic queue management to cater to various computational needs.
Centralized Management
Tachyon provides a single control plane for managing HPC clusters, storage, and databases, all while ensuring compliance with organizational policies. This centralized approach not only standardizes cluster provisioning across teams but also enhances security through continuous governance and policy management.
Improves Overall Efficiency
Integrated monitoring features offer a unified view of all HPC activities, simplifying troubleshooting and improving overall efficiency. With real-time insights into job execution, compute utilization, and cost tracking, Tachyon empowers organizations to optimize their HPC investments continuously.
Simplifying HPC on the Cloud
By abstracting the complexities of cloud infrastructure, Tachyon allows IT teams to migrate on-premise HPC workloads to the cloud effortlessly. The platform’s simplified interface and automation features reduce the need for a large team of cloud experts, making it easier to manage and scale HPC environments.
Conclusion
Tachyon is more than just an HPC platform, it’s a catalyst for innovation. By providing a scalable, cost-effective, and user-friendly environment for high-performance computing, Tachyon is transforming how enterprises and researchers approach computational challenges. Whether you’re looking to accelerate your research, reduce costs, or enhance productivity, Tachyon is a powerful tool that can help you achieve your goals.
For organizations ready to harness the full potential of cloud-based HPC, Tachyon offers a future-proof solution that combines cutting-edge technology with ease of use, making high-performance computing accessible to all.
In the next set of blogs in this series, we will delve into each of the key features of the Tachyon platform.