Office HPC brings supercomputing capability to any office environment – with silent, cost-effective, high speed, license-optimised, fully-supported HPC units that are designed to work with your existing workflow. Pioneered by CrunchYard on SUSE Linux Enterprise, Office HPC makes true HPC available to anyone. But how do you choose the model that will best fit your needs?

Whether a large enterprise or a small engineering firm, you know that underspending on HPC resources harms productivity, increasing engineer frustration and slowing time to delivery.  Overspending unnecessarily consumes capital that can be put to better use.  This is why Office HPC is available in three models, simply designated as SMALL, MEDIUM, and LARGE.  These models are designed to help you right-size your HPC resource investment to best support your simulation requirements, team size, and software licensing budget.

 Understanding the requirements of your simulation is a primary consideration.  Both the type and size of the simulation can hugely impact the required compute and memory resources. For example, in CFD (computational fluid dynamics) applications, 40M cells can still comfortably run on a single, Office HPC SMALL unit. Scaling this up to 80M cells, a MEDIUM unit will do the trick. And, we offer Office HPC LARGE to take on your tougher workloads.  Ask yourself: : Can my single biggest simulation run on the system?

The second consideration focuses on the number of people in your team. Multiple users can utilise the same Office HPC unit, but, as job queues get longer, overall productivity - and team morale - begins to suffer. If the team consists of 1 or 2 engineers, Office HPC SMALL may be sufficient, depending on the workloads. MEDIUM is a good choice for teams of 3 to 5.  For bigger teams, you can scale up to LARGE.  The question to ask yourself is: How many users will typically need to utilise the system concurrently?

  A third consideration is software.  Software licenses can be very expensive (up to 10X the cost of the hardware). Complicating matters are the various licensing schemes. Some licenses are tied to a single computer’s MAC address, while others may be managed through a remote license server. Some can impose limits on the number of CPU cores that can be used for a simulation, while others do not.  This is further complicated when you require multiple simulation software with conflicting licensing requirements. Here you ask: How many licenses do I need? This can be one of the most difficult questions to answer.  With over a decade of experience in optimising licenses for on-site, cloud, and hybrid HPC solutions, CrunchYard can help you with this.

Office HPC is available as:

If all this is still confusing and you need some expert help in choosing the HPC that is best for your needs, CrunchYard is happy to assist. Contact us at info@crunchyard.com, or CLICK HERE for a form that walks you through the process. 

At CrunchYard we offer solutions and services to empower you to achieve your scientific computing goals.