Deep Computing Services

The IBM Deep Computing Services offering is a market driven response to customers seeking highly specialized skills and expertise from the IBM Research and Development teams. These services can be provided as an element of the total opportunity or the service offering can be used to facilitate a more formal collaboration. In either case, the appropriate skills will be identified and made available to meet the customer’s needs.

The IBM Deep Computing Services offering has a robust value proposition for HPC customers.

• Serves as a catalyst to improve both the efficiency and effectiveness of your organizations HPC initiative
• Offers access to IBM’s renowned skills and industry expertise from our expansive Research and Development teams. In essence, our team becomes the customer’s team.
• Mitigates Risk by ensuring the right sets of skills are available “on demand” to supplement those of the customer to ensure all objectives are met.
• Will assist customers at any phase in their system planning and implementation process beginning with HPC Strategy and Planning through System Enablement and Optimization.

Our services can be tailored to meet the needs of clients that are new to technical computing as well as those that want to bolster existing capabilities. Our experts can assist with the following

• HPC strategy consultation to assist with creating a blue print for an organization wide HPC strategy and provide guidance and support to execute the strategy.
• HPC Education services to educate customers on latest tools and techniques available in the marketplace to enhance their HPC initiatives.
• Ultra-scale computing using Blue Gene for breakthrough science and engineering to address problems that are viewed as unsolvable with traditional cluster solutions.
• HPC Cluster solutions applied in a variety of scientific areas, e.g. life science, environmental sciences, and many engineering areas.
• Effectively exploit Innovative technologies such as hybrid architectures and associated algorithms to impact challenging scientific and engineering problems.
• Application of HPC Software and Tools to develop efficient, robust algorithms and applications to meet the needs of today’s technology based institutions.
• Use of innovative visualization techniques such as Deep Computing Visualization (DCV) to gain insight from simulation based engineering sciences.
• Optimize use of Computing on Demand (CoD) to assist the use of HPC for modeling and simulation of scientific and engineering problems, inoperability, or system outages.

The Deep Computing Services Offering Portfolio covers a full range of customizable services to help clients design, develop, integrate, optimize, validate and deploy comprehensive solutions to address their High Performance Computing challenges.

• HPC Strategy – Crafting an integrated research, business and technology strategy to align the operational elements of the datacenter with the goals and mission of the organization. Includes architecture design, portfolio planning & management.
• Computational Science and Engineering R&D – Computational science expertise in support of scientific domain expertise to develop new solutions to customer scientific and engineering problems.
• HPC Application support – Algorithmic and application development, customer application porting to new technology, tuning and optimization across a wide variety of market segments and HW platforms.
• Deep Computing Integrated Solutions – The definition, design, and integration of hardware, software and services to address a unique customer challenge in innovative ways, often employing a First-of-a-Kind (FOAK) solution.
• HPC Tools – Can include the porting and optimization of codes through the use of tools (ie. HPC Toolkit) as well as new tool development or modifications based on customer requirements
• Deep Computing Visualization support – Can span the design and integration of a visualization system as well as development of unique components and related services to support insight on scientific and engineering problems through visualization solutions
• HPC Software – To address unique customer requirements not satisfied from available software LPs.
• Platform Optimization – Can provide a variety of platform specific support for the Deep Computing product portfolio taking better advantage of computational science and engineering tools.
• On Demand Deep Computing services – Combines the ability to provide Deep Computing services with the Deep Computing Capacity on Demand offering so deliverables can be tested and demonstrated via the wide variety of on demand systems available
• Data Management/Storage Optimization Support – Can provide architecture, configuration, and implementation for high performance/high density Deep Computing storage through integration of servers, middleware and disks for optimal performance

The Deep Computing Services has been used by a number of customers and in a number of in proposals to date. Some of the key areas this service offering has been used include:

• Education – To expedite application development across multiple system architectures, The University of Toronto engaged IBM to provide a deep dive on the use of Message Passing Interface (MPI) to parallelize applications.
• Strategy & Consultation – IBM provided HPC strategy and business development consultation to Rocky Mountain Supercomputing Center (RMSC). RMSC quote: "The Rocky Mountain Supercomputing Centers, Inc. , a private, non-profit Montana corporation, contracted with IBM's Deep Computing Services to provide superior High Performance Computing (HPC) strategy and business development consulting that allowed us to jumpstart “on demand computing” in Montana," said Dr. Alex Philp, CEO of RMSC. "Having a world leader in HPC like IBM, along with its extensive knowledge of customers, industries and processes, allowed RMSC and its partners to save significant time and resources getting RMSC to a successful start. We continue to use these services to help drive transactions and innovations at RMSC."
• Research Collaboration – There are many instances where the service offering was included as a key element of the overall HPC system proposal. The collaboration activity spans multiple years and brings IBM’s R&D participation to customer research activities to expedite their efficiency and capability in “grand challenge” application areas.
• Application Development – An HPC research group engaged IBM on a unique application development effort that demanded skills and expertise not available internally.
• Deep Computing Visualization (DCV) Installation support – A University exploited the offering to expedite installation and use of their visualization solution while also gaining better insight and knowledge of the system through education and consultation.
• Tools and Software support – Where unique software enhancements were requested by a customer to meet their specific needs.
• HPC Skills / Application Porting – Another large university included the Deep Computing Service offering as a key element of the funding proposal as a risk mitigation strategy that would prevent delays in porting applications to a new technology platform.