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Cloud Management: The Impact Adaptive's Alliance with the NCSA Will Have on SMMs

As cloud computing continues to become adopted by enterprises around the world, cloud management is emerging as a critical component of cloud adoption strategies, including tasks such as performance monitoring – and of high performance computing (HPC) in particular.

Adaptive Computing recently joined the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) Private Sector Program (PSP) – which is good news for small to medium sized manufacturers (SMMs), a.k.a. the “missing middle,” according to a recent article published by the Digital Manufacturing Report.

The company, which manages some of the world’s largest supercomputing systems and is an expert in HPC workload management solutions, is the latest to join NCSA’s Private Sector Program, which puts the center’s expertise to work on some of the toughest challenges faced by industry.

According to the article’s author John Kirkley, the alliance between Adaptive and the NCSA is a nice fit – with NCSA PSP resources, including the Center’s iForge supercomputer system that is specifically designed to meet the computational needs of industry partners like Boeing (News - Alert), BP, Caterpillar, John Deere, Proctor & Gamble, and Rolls Royce, among others.

NCSA’s Private Sector Program puts the center’s expertise and technological innovation to work on the real-world challenges faced by business and industry. This program brings the promise of HPC to a broad segment of the market and enables businesses to tap into all the benefits HPC has to offer as well as having access to a wealth of knowledge within the HPC community.

“Adaptive Computing is taking advantage of a partnership category for software developers,” said Merle Giles, leader of NCSA’s Private Sector Program. “We think these partnerships will help develop an important three-way dialogue among software developers, industrial end users, and large HPC providers like NCSA.”

In fact, the HPC space is doing quite well for a number of reasons including the need to process big data applications as well the fact that many universities are flush with cash and continue to see value in purchasing these super-powerful computers, TMC CEO Rich Tehrani (News - Alert) recently pointed out in this blog post.

With HPC, as long as the customer has enough workload, Adaptive can guarantee 90 to 99 percent utilization, according to Michael Jackson, president of Adaptive, who addressed the alliance the benefits that can accrue to SMMs that take advantage of NCSA’s PSP.

“The NCSA not only provides the HPC resources in the form of iForge, allowing users to test their applications in a well-understood, dedicated HPC environment, but also the support of a skilled staff and researchers from the University of Illinois,” the Digital Manufacturing report said.

Located at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the 25-year-old NCSA regularly works with universities and government agencies to help them understand how they can partner more effectively with industry.

As Kirkley summarized about the Adaptive-NCSA alliance: “For the some 300,000 SMMs in America with fewer than 500 employees – companies that are responsible for twice as much employment as all the bigger manufacturers combined and 65 percent of all research and development in the sector – the growing accessibility to HPC is good news indeed.”

In related news, Hewlett-Packard (News - Alert) was recently awarded a partial contract by the U.S. Department of Defense to build a private cloud network, TMCnet reported. Private cloud computing is an attractive option for many organizations for whom public cloud computing offerings may not yet be viable. Choosing when to provide or consume a cloud service is the latest iteration of the evergreen question of “build versus buy.”

In the case of HP and the DOD, the issue could never be more relevant because the Army Private Cloud Contract (APC2) is valued at $250 million. As part of the contract, HP will work with military defense contractors Northrop Grumann and General Dynamics (News - Alert).

Edited by Carrie Schmelkin

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