IBM to Brand Rescale’s HPC-in-Cloud Platform 

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HPC (or big compute)-in-the-cloud platform provider Rescale has formalized the work it’s been doing in partnership with public cloud vendors by announcing its Powered by Rescale program – with IBM as its first named partner – essentially an OEM turnkey capability supporting access to HPC hardware, software and administration capabilities under the partner’s label.

The Powered by Rescale program also provides pay-per-use metering and billing of software and hardware that can flow through the partner, as well as integrations with a partner’s billing and CRM system. IBM is collaborating with Rescale to provide a full-stack, HPC solution in the IBM Cloud for enterprises, according to Rescale.

“The convergence of major technologies such as simulation, machine learning, Internet of Things, HPC, and cloud has created a tremendous amount of complexity for vendors, making it difficult for them to successfully deploy their product and/or service in enterprise big compute environments,” said Tyler Smith, head of partnerships at Rescale. “With the Powered by Rescale program, partners can deliver their product and/or service to customers as part of an end-to-end solution under their brands. This allows partners in the simulation and HPC space to participate in net-new cloud business opportunities while maintaining focus on their core technology and competency.”

Founded seven years ago, San Francisco-based Rescale recently completed a Series B venture round totaling $32 million. The company claims more than 125 Global 2000 enterprise customers, including four of the five largest automotive manufacturers and two of the three largest aerospace and defense companies.

Smith told EnterpriseTech that Rescale’s flagship ScaleX is a multi-cloud simulation and HPC platform for engineering and scientific modeling, with access to Rescale’s SaaS library (ANSYS, Siemens, LS-DYNA, etc.), to its HPC network comprised of the public cloud providers and supercomputing centers, among others.  Rescale’s platform matches software applications with architectures in the cloud or on-premises.

By contrast, Smith said, Powered by Rescale is a customized, OEM-like solution. “So with IBM, it will integrate more of their services rather than just their compute infrastructure, it will leverage (IBM Spectrum) LSF (workload management software), (IBM) GPFS, and also be accessible through the IBM Cloud catalogue in an IBM-branded fashion. And the entire transaction will happen with IBM, and then on the back end, you’re able to leverage Rescale’s licensing infrastructure, in which we’re hosting the software licenses, were also still doing the billing, the metering, integrated into IBM business processes. “

Smith said the program’s objective is not only to make HPC-in-the-cloud accessible, but to create a seamless experience for its partner’s end users. He also acknowledged that some capabilities of Rescale’s partner’s cloud platforms may overlap with those offered by Rescale itself.

“The idea of where (Rescale) came from was the idea was to build a single platform to access all of your HPC hardware and software, and there’s definitely parts with our partners that may overlap – and that’s OK,” he said. “Our focus is on delivering that seamless experience to our customers and making it in a way that increases accessibility and overall usability – whether that’s an engineer submitting a job, or an IT administrator setting a budget and governance over their HPC environment, or to a C-level executive getting higher level insights into their IT environment.”

Smith said other Powered by Rescale program partnership announcements will be forthcoming.

“The rapidly increasing volume of data presents an opportunity for enterprises to adopt cloud for HPC workloads so they can efficiently and securely analyze, share and generate new business insights,” said Keri Olson, director of HPC offerings at IBM Cloud. “We are collaborating with Rescale to combine the power and global reach of IBM Cloud infrastructure with Rescale’s HPC management platform to provide a new integrated solution for large scale data simulations and modeling on the IBM Cloud.”