Southwest Research Institute & Nor-Tech

The Client’s Situation
Nor-Tech’s Senior HPC Account Manager Bob Dreis has been working with Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) to develop and deliver high performance technology since 2015. The most recent order was for a cluster with 12 Intel® Cascade Lake Processors. For this order, SwRI was referred to Nor-Tech by Convergent Science, developers of Converge CFD.

SwRI isn’t the first customer that Convergent Science has referred to Nor-Tech. Bob explained, “SwRI had good experiences with Nor-Tech in the past and Convergent Science recommends Nor-Tech because they know Nor-Tech will take care of the client. There is value in the fact that software companies consistently recommend us. They trust us because they are responsible for the performance of whomever they recommend.”

Bob worked with SwRI’s CFD Research Engineer. “We asked Convergent if they could recommend someone that can handle a big cluster,” the engineer said. “Nor-Tech’s name came up right away. I also knew about the other clusters that Nor-Tech built for SwRI and we knew that our colleagues were happy.”

Our Solution
Nor-Tech designed a single rack with multiple compute nodes. In addition to Converge CFD, SwRI asked Nor-Tech to integrate two other CFD software applications. SwRI already knew what they wanted. Bob suggested that they also consider Open OnDemand—a trailblazing cluster web portal utility, developed at the Ohio Supercomputing Center. Nor-Tech’s VP of Engineering Dom Daninger was an early adopter of Open OnDemand software into the commercial marketplace. Open OnDemand provides a GUI web portal for job submission and access to the cluster (learn more about Open OnDemand later in this case study).

“This was our first deployment of Open OnDemand,” Bob explained. “It was kind of a surprise for SwRI—a pleasant surprise—once they saw the functionality that Open OnDemand provided” Nor-Tech labels interconnects and creates a custom Quick Start Guide (QSG) with pictures of the actual equipment that allowed SwRI to quickly deploy the system on-site themselves. The system is deployed and functioning as desired.

Their Success
“Right now we are using Open OnDemand for running simulations—and it is definitely helpful,” SwRI’s engineer said. “The Cascade Lake processors have all of the speed we were hoping for; meeting or exceeding our requirements.”

Although the client had some initial problems (out of Nor-Tech’s control) with internal environmental issues, everything is currently running like clockwork.

“Bob and Nor-Tech’s engineers have been very responsive,” SwRI’s engineer said. “We are planning to add more nodes in the future, maybe next year, and we will definitely contact Nor-Tech for that. I would recommend Nor-Tech because they were both knowledgeable and responsive even before we signed a contract. They were also able to build and deliver the cluster quickly.”

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