Numerical Algorithms Group and Red Oak Consulting support KAUST petascale supercomputer project
11 December 2014 - Trusted HPC expertise and experience from the Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) and Red Oak Consulting was a key component of a large supercomputer project announced at SC14 by King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia. The project awarded a contract to Cray Inc. for a supercomputer with nearly 200,000 cores, plus options for future upgrades. KAUST benefited from NAG and Red Oak consulting during the procurement and planning processes of the project, and will continue to do so into the commissioning and acceptance phases.
The team from NAG and Red Oak brought their track record of involvement in over 40 HPC procurement projects around the world and delivered impartial expert advice based on experience across the whole lifecycle, from supporting the drafting of the procurement documents, through datacentre planning, benchmarking, bid evaluation, and contract negotiations. The NAG and Red Oak team will continue to support the KAUST project through installation and commissioning, acceptance testing, and user support planning.
Gregory Newby, Manager of the KAUST Supercomputing Laboratory, said: “The experience and expertise that NAG and Red Oak brought to our project was invaluable in ensuring the best value for KAUST while reducing project risks. I believe we ended up with a better solution as a result of their input. The NAG and Red Oak team went the extra mile and integrated seamlessly into our project team, offering advice and experience across all aspects of the procurement process.”
Andrew Jones, Vice President of HPC Consulting and Services at NAG, said: “It was a delight working with KAUST on this high profile supercomputer project at an institution with a clear and ambitious computation-based research vision. We were impressed with the commitment, capability and professionalism of staff across the KAUST organisation. We are very happy to have been able to add value based on our experience in procuring, managing and supporting other HPC facilities around the world.”
Owen Thomas, Partner at Red Oak Consulting, said: “NAG and Red Oak enjoy a shared ethos of impartiality, integrity and expertise based on experience – enabling us to continue our track record of delivering value to our customers through an integrated and knowledgeable team. We look forward to the supporting the next phases of the project.”
NAG and its strategic partner for HPC, Red Oak Consulting, are together able to provide impartial advice and proven expertise based on experience across any aspect of HPC – from strategy, to service planning, to technology advice, to software and algorithms, to performance enhancements. This support is available as consulting, professional services, delivery-focused projects, or training and has been delivered to customers around the world, across private and public sectors. NAG and Red Oak work with customers separately or as a highly effective and integrated team, depending on each customer need.
About NAG
The Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG) applies its unique expertise in numerical engineering to delivering high-quality computational software, consultancy and high performance computing services. For over 40 years NAG experts have worked closely with world-leading researchers in academia and industry to provide powerful, reliable and flexible software and solutions relied on by tens of thousands of individual users, as well as numerous independent software vendors. NAG is a not-for-profit organisation and serves its customers from offices in Oxford, Manchester, Chicago and Tokyo, through staff in France and Germany, as well as via a global network of distributors.
Together with the globally renowned NAG Library, NAG experts assist others in many ways, whether that be by parallelizing serial codes so they optimally perform on HPC hardware to delivering in-depth technical training courses through developing bespoke algorithms.
About Red Oak Consulting
Red Oak Consulting is a leading high-performance computing consultancy with a customer base of users in government, industry and academia. Red Oak provides tailored, specialist advice on all parts of the HPC lifecycle and also undertakes new technology assessments.
For more information see:
Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG)
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UK
www.nag.com | 44 (0)1865 511245 | katie.ohare@nag.co.uk