Kevin D. Hall

Recently Möbius Partners worked with a client who lacked high-performance computing (HPC) cluster manageability tools that resulted in non-standardized operating systems and patching inconsistencies. This customer entrusted our team to provide a solution that would be “easy to use and manage” by their own staff. To overcome these challenges, our team first redeployed HPC with HPE Cluster Management Utility (CMU), which enabled the client to manage multiple images and cluster resources with a standard operating system.

We then used the Adaptive Computing HPC Suite to deliver the clustered resources our client needed to run complex chemistry computation on Gaussian, an application that provides state-of-art capabilities for electronic structure modeling. The solution helped manage the intensive computations consuming the HPE BladeSystem enclosures enabling software to improve delivery of expedited results.

We were successful, but there was still work to be done. Our client faced an additional challenge with efficiently managing users and groups in the cluster that required SSH Keys. We solved this issue by developing a custom solution that delivered a user-friendly process for giving additional users access to the client’s systems.

Ultimately, the HPE CMU solution our team put in place delivered significant value by standardizing and modernizing the compute node OS, and enabling our client’s IT Administrators to deliver updated and new software packages to its HPC Suite consumers. In addition, the Möbius Partners team enabled manageability, and consumption across multiple departments, and now their patching and updating tasks of the client’s servers are easy to accomplish.

Challenges:

• No cluster manageability tools
• Non-standardized OS
• Patching inconsistencies

Solutions:

• HPE Cluster Management Utility
• Adaptive Computing HPC Suite
• Custom, Möbius Partners-designed solution

Benefits:

• Standardized and modernized compute node OS
• Improved manageability and consumption
• User-friendly process for adding users
• Easier and faster patching and updating