Our Services

Our products span bare-metal integration, on-hand expertise for advice as you need it, and full operational management of your HPC environments.

Bare-Metal Integration.

Comprising hardware installation, validation and verification, our bare-metal integration product includes:

Services

  • Full project management from conception to delivery.
  • Provision of site and pre-installation surveys.
  • Delivery aggregation, offsite staging and pre-acceptance testing.
  • A specialised delivery service for seamless, friction-free installation.
  • Application of acceptance validation and verification testing processes.
  • Delivery of comprehensive testing and audit documentation.
  • Optional integration with your existing systems.
  • Standard operating system installed ready for handover.

Benefits

  • Minimise your risk for new installations.
  • Use our proven HPC environment and performance capabilities.
  • Apply our expertise of an industry-wide spectrum of technologies and solutions:
    • Hardware vendors: APC, ATOS, Cisco, Cray, DDN, DellEMC, HPE, IBM, Lenovo, Mellanox, Netapp, Nvidia, Panasas.
    • Cloud platforms: AWS, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure, OpenStack, VMware.
    • Value-added resellers: Boston, DTP, Exertis Hammer, Fujitsu, ROC Technologies (Esteem Systems), TechData, TecTrade.
    • Software providers: AMD, Arm, BeeGFS, Cray, Ellexus, Intel, OpenFlightHPC, OpenHPC, Quobyte, Redhat, Starfish, SuSE.

Self-Managed HPC.

Retain full responsibility for your HPC solution while supplementing it with access to expert advice with a consultancy service plan.

For new installations

  • Build on our bare-metal integration product.
  • We'll add hardware specification consultancy to ensure your solution integrates and operates smoothly.

For existing installations

  • We'll perform a comprehensive audit of your existing hardware installation.
  • You'll receive a detailed set of system documentation.
  • We'll provide you with recommendations for next steps.

Platform software provision

With the base platform established, we'll arrange an on-site pre-installation meeting to discuss your platform software requirements. We perform an industry best-practice Open Platform installation, with options including:

  • OpenHPC for bare-metal, comprising:
    • Administrative tools including: clustershell, conman, genders, lmod, mrsh, pdsh, prun.
    • Compilers including: GNU series, Intel ICP, LLVM suite.
    • Development tools: automake, cmake, valgrind.
    • MPI runtime packages: Intel MPI compat, MPICH, MVAPICH2, OpenMPI.
    • Parallel libraries including: boost, fftw, hypre, mumps, petsc, scotch, slepc, trilinos.
    • Provisioning tools including: XCAT, Warewulf.
    • Job-scheduling including: Slurm, PBSPro, Open Grid Scheduler.
    • Monitoring and alerting: Nagios and Ganglia.
  • OpenStack for private-cloud on bare-metal.

Access to our expertise

Supplement your HPC solution with access to call-off consultancy via Alces Flight Center:

  • Annual subscription to our Alces Flight Center service portal, providing:
    • A centralised service housing all documentation and information regarding your HPC solution.
    • Configurable access and visibility for multiple users within your organisation.
    • A documentation repository for hardware, cloud and software assets.
    • Project governance features.
  • Service credits allocated on demand to deliver your chosen services.
  • Access to expert engineers on a consultancy basis:
    • You retain responsibility for routine maintenance, break-fix servicing and usage and configuration of all software.
    • Advice-only consultancy provided by our expert engineers.
    • Optional management of interaction with upstream code-base support from named providers (as nominated/selected by you).
    • 4-hour SLA available for urgent cases to ensure business continuity.

Benefits

  • Turn-key solution for self-supporting customers.
  • Ideal for customers who prefer to adjust a pre-installed base rather than undertake a wholesale redeployment.
  • Reduces risk and shortens time-scales for getting a base platform running after hardware installation.
  • Option for ongoing advice and consultancy on base platform when required.

Managed Platforms.

Build out your HPC solution with our fully-managed platform product. Available for HPC clusters and private cloud systems, we provide:

Services

  • All the benefits of Flight for Self-Managed HPC plus:
    • Daily checks to ensure the ongoing operation of your environment and to mitigate developing issues before they cause issues.
    • Management of all hardware and/or cloud components.
    • Asset management and auditing.
    • Remote monitoring and alerting.
    • Change-control and verification process.
    • Statement of work (SOW) management for complex projects.
  • The Alces Flight Gateway access, control and monitoring appliance.

Benefits

  • Reduces risk around ongoing management of the base platform.
  • Stable, change-managed platform.
  • Ideal for sites looking to focus on end-users rather than software technologies.
  • De-risks the installation and ongoing management of new systems.

Managed Environments.

Built on top of our fully-managed platform product, our fully-managed environment product creates a fully comprehensive HPC solution that includes:

Services

  • All the features of our Flight for Managed Platforms product.
  • End-user management services.
  • Software application configuration and optimisation assistance.
  • Job-scheduler management, monitoring and configuration.
  • Disaster-recovery and business-continuity options.
  • Alces Flight Direct HPC user environment, comprising:
    • Multiple simultaneous software environments supporting a diverse user-base.
    • Flight Gridware: HPC application compilation, installation and optimization management.
    • Easybuild, Spack and Conda application management environments.
    • Singularity containerisation support, including Docker container compatibility.
    • Remote GUI desktop capabilities for your HPC environment.
    • Compatible with Intel, AMD, Arm and Power CPU architectures.
    • Operates with Nvidia, Intel and AMD accelerators.

Benefits

  • End-to-end managed environment.
  • Allows you to focus on your primary business activities.
  • Ongoing “best-results” involvement from our engineers.
  • Enables portability and platform agnosticism.

Consultancy and Training.

Engage us to help you achieve the aims of your HPC projects.

We can provide:

  • Bespoke management services for your existing platform (subject to an audit of your existing hardware installation).
  • Ongoing projects to create or enhance your on-premise, third-party hosted or cloud-based HPC environment via requirements analysis, implementation, testing and ongoing management.
  • Training and engagement with user groups within your organisation to enhance usage of existing HPC solutions.
  • Benchmarking and optimisation services.

Contact us now to discuss your requirements.

info@alces-flight.com