Cycle Computing

Nature never worries about capacity. Neither should you.

Spinning up an Unprecedented High Performance Computing Cluster Using Cycle Computing's CycleCloud Technology Provides Biomedical Giant with Instant Datacenter for Protein Binding Research Project.

The Challenge

Cycle Computing helps customers of all sizes gain fast and efficient access to the kind of supercomputing muscle usually reserved for universities and large research organizations. Cycle's founder, CEO and HPC expert Jason Stowe wanted to test the envelope of cloud computing and take its technology to the next level - spinning up a 10,000- core cluster in the cloud. Stowe teamed up with a prominent life science company who needed supercomputing power to research how proteins bind to each other, and utilized Amazon Web Services to begin provisioning 10,000 cores in an HPC cluster on Amazon's EC2 compute cloud.

The Solution

Cycles's Technical Operations department deployed using a CentOS Linux cluster; Cycle built its 10,000 cores using 1,250 instances with eight cores each. Scaling up roughly 2,000 cores at a time, Cycle enlisted its own CycleCloud software, the Condor scheduling system, and Opscode's Chef cloud infrastructure automation engine. Using Chef, the total time to provision the entire cluster was 45 minutes, and cost approximately $1,000 per hour for a 10,000-core cluster.

The Results

  • Set up time significantly reduces from weeks or months to minutes.
  • Increased agility and reliability to more efficiently manage platform configuration.
  • Improved configuration to increase the scale, to enable creation hundreds of execute nodes at once, without any errors.
  • Increased cost savings by eliminating cluster ownership/maintenance costs of building out a 10,000 core cluster infrastructure.
"We amplified our Chef infrastructure and streamlined configuration scripts to help scalability. We developed an approximate timing architecture which benchmarked and facilitated the increased peak number of nodes and the nodes per unit time. Opscode's Chef enabled us to easily and reliably configure our systems to meet our demanding scale requirements." Jason Stowe, CEO

About Opscode

Opscode is the provider of Chef, the automation platform for the coded business. Opscode Chef provides the speed, flexibility, and efficiency to compete in the digital economy. By modeling IT infrastructure and application delivery as code, Chef empowers businesses of all sizes to easily scale to meet demand, eliminate down time, manage complexity, and accelerate time to market.