2022 is ending and we decided to look back and summarize some of our achievements. 2022 was as usual extremely exciting for Drizti, with new functionality added to HPCBOX, support for exciting new hardware and some cool achievements which once again validate our vision of One Cloud HPC Platform with a Personal Supercomputing experience. We are very Thankful to all our customers and partners who drove us to improve HPCBOX and gave us the opportunity to support their innovation. Highlights of 2022Support for cutting-edge CFD with CONVERGEMidway through 2022, we collaborated with Convergent Science and added support for their cutting-edge CFD software package, CONVERGE, and it’s accompanying tools CONVERGE_Studio and Tecplot. With this integration, we were able to empower CONVERGE users with best-in-class HPC resources, powered by AMD Milan-X, while still giving them the possibility to use CONVERGE just as they would on their local workstations. i.e., in fully graphical interactive mode. Thanks to Convergent Science for their support and collaboration to make this happen. Read about this in detail here Tapping into HPC on Azure literally from the cloudsDuring one of my flights over the Atlantic, I had the opportunity to fly Qatar Airways. Because of a need to support some users and to continue my development work to add OpenRadioss support to HPCBOX, I made use of their on-board Wi-Fi. It was a well priced package and to my surprise, I was able to work effectively on one of our HPCBOX clusters in the East US, from over the Atlantic, utilizing the fully interactive user experience of HPCBOX. Because HPCBOX lets us use our applications with their native graphical interface on HPC clusters, I was also able to use my development tools like VS Code and continue writing code for the next version of HPCBOX. Amazing! Overnight upgrade to 3D V-Cache with AMD EPYC Milan-XLast year Microsoft announced the preview of Milan-X with 3D V-Cache technology. We’d made sure HPCBOX could support it and when it went into GA, our users were pleasantly surprised that their simulations were running much faster when they powered on their HPCBOX clusters one morning after having shut them down overnight before going home! Thanks to Microsoft for planning this seamless upgrade. I believe HBv4 will be upgraded to AMD Genoa-X the same way. Bringing HPC to Microsoft Modern WorkplaceHPC has always been a niche area and kind of cut off from all the other modern workplace tools like Microsoft Office, Microsoft Teams etc. We wanted to bridge this gap and pave the way for future development of HPCBOX and for our plans to make HPC accessible to more business areas within an organization. As our first step in this endeavor, we integrated HPCBOX Management directly into Microsoft Teams and created a channel for Help and Support within Teams. This was an exciting feature to design and build. Now, we have a hook into Modern Workplace and we just have to plugin HPC capabilities to it :-). Read about this in detail here Looking ahead into 2023Eagerly looking forward to 2023 and some of the plans are:
That’s a wrap for 2022. Drizti wishes everyone Happy Holidays and a Wonderful and Healthy 2023! ![]() Author Dev S. Founder and CTO, Drizti Inc As another year comes to an end, as usual, we decided to summarize some of our achievements in 2021. 2021 was hyper charged for Drizti, with lots of new functionality added to HPCBOX, support for exciting new hardware and some cool achievements which validate our vision of "One Cloud HPC Platform - Any Application" delivering a Personal Supercomputing experience and driving innovation. We are very Thankful to all our customers and partners who drove us to improve HPCBOX and gave us the opportunity to support them. Highlights of 2021Some of the highlights in 2021 for Drizti and HPCBOX. New customersWe had an opportunity to increase our customer base and work with some very exciting use cases for HPC in the cloud, specifically on Microsoft Azure. These customers utilized HPCBOX for a variety of workflows using many different applications which could effortlessly be integrated into HPCBOX. Launch Partner for AMD EPYC MilanDrizti was one of the Microsoft launch partners for the Microsoft Azure HBv3 instances powered by AMD EPYC Milan. This happened in March of 2021 and little did we know that within 12 months we’d see an even more exciting upgrade of AMD EPYC Milan, more on that later. It was exciting to see Drizti’s logo along with other Microsoft partners displayed during the AMD EPYC launch event for Milan. Thank you, Microsoft, for recognizing your partners. Read a more detailed blog post on this release here. HPCBOX AutoScalerAs usual, customer requirements and questions drive us to work harder and improve HPCBOX. We designed and implemented AutoScaling functionality in HPCBOX with support for spot priced instances on Microsoft Azure. This functionality lets users take advantage of the lower pricing on spot instances for their HPC workloads, while, at the same time, combine it with standard instances on the same HPCBOX cluster for critical workloads which cannot be restarted. You can read more about our AutoScaler here and support for spot instances here. Extreme scale supercomputing on HPCBOXWe had a wonderful opportunity in 2021 to work with scientists and researches from General Atomics and San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) to develop a prototype for fusion reactor simulations on the cloud. We combined Microsoft’s Azure platform with Drizti’s HPCBOX and GA’s industry-leading CGYRO physics code to create a personal supercomputing experience for scientists giving them a cutting edge personal HPC resource for Fusion simulations. We used multiple NDv4 instances on Azure and the performance we were able to obtain surpassed some of the fastest supercomputers in use today for Nuclear Fusion simulations. The results were so impressive that we presented a poster at SC21 highlighting the results and potential future developments. You can read more about Extreme Scale Personal Supercomputing on Azure with HPCBOX here. You can read more on the HPC cloud prototype for Nuclear Fusion simulations powered by HPCBOX here. Hypercharged performance with Milan-XIn early December 2021, we got preview access to the next generation HBv3 instances on Microsoft Azure. These instances are powered by the new Milan-X processors. The performance numbers on these new instances are super amazing and we are again very thankful to Microsoft for giving us an opportunity to get ready for its launch right from Day-1. Read more about our experiences with Milan-X here. Looking ahead into 2022We are eagerly looking forward to 2022 and some of the things we’ve planned are:
That’s a wrap for 2021. Drizti wishes everyone Happy Holidays and a Wonderful and Healthy 2022! ![]() Author Dev S. Founder and CTO, Drizti Inc
As an extraordinary 2020 finally comes to an end, we thought it would be a good time to summarize Drizti's achievements in 2020 and highlight some of the upcoming exciting products and features in the pipeline for 2021.
Firstly, we’d like to thank all our users and partners for supporting Drizti’s vision of “Personal Supercomputing”. Drizti set out to enhance the cloud HPC/Supercomputing experience to make it as simple as personal computing and the feedback we’ve received so far is very encouraging! Highlights of 2020
Support for new applications and HPC Hardware
We’ve been busy this year adding support for new applications on our HPCBOX platform and most of these have been a direct outcome of user requests we’ve received. Some of these are:
Abaqus, LS-DYNA and Nastran take advantage of the enhanced workflow capability in HPCBOX that allows users to seamlessly create their complex pipelines involving these applications. Support for Microsoft Windows was pretty exciting, since our users could now work fully remote, combining both Windows and Linux applications in one workflow on their fully interactive HPCBOX cluster. HPCBOX supports the entire portfolio of Microsoft Azure HPC instance sizes in 2020, i.e., HB2, HB, HC, NC, ND, NV. HPCBOX Management We also released a preview of our HPCBOX Management Application, integrated with Azure AD to help administrators monitor and manage all the HPCBOX clusters which are active within their Azure Subscription. Although we built this for internal use, to support the various clusters in our fully managed service, we decided to make it available to our customers who have multiple HPCBOX clusters within their subscription. We are enhancing it with more features after receiving feedback from early adopters. Stay tuned for more on this.
Amazing user stories
We enjoyed working with our users in 2020 and shared some of the amazing stories of how they used HPCBOX in their product development. Thank You to everyone who took their time to work with us in creating these case studies. (The following links open in a new window) INDUSTRY: MARITIME ENGINEERING INDUSTRY: APPLIED SCIENCES INDUSTRY: FORMULA RACING INDUSTRY: FORMULA RACING We hope to be able to share more such amazing stories in 2021. Exciting partnership with Microsoft Our partnership with Microsoft has been exciting this year and we’ve had the privilege of working with some amazing folks at Microsoft. Some of the success stories we were able to achieve was because of this great partnership with them. Thank You to everyone at Microsoft for working with us. Oh, did I mention that HPCBOX is Microsoft IP Co-Sell Certified! Some of the highlights from the Partnership with Microsoft in 2020: HPCBOX on Azure enables naval architect's engineering services Accelerate Innovation with HPCBOX on Azure
Exciting partnership with ANSYS The exciting partnership with ANSYS gave us an opportunity to add support and test some of their products on HPCBOX for ANSYS users who use HPCBOX for HPC workloads on the cloud. Thank You to all the folks at ANSYS who have supported us. Exciting time at the DMZ Accelerator We had a wonderful time at the DMZ accelerator and graduated in 2020. Thanks to folks at DMZ for all the support. On podcasts and the A-to-Z list It was a really good feeling when HPCBOX was discussed on CFD Engine's podcast, episode 12. We were also on the A to Z of Cloud CFD list! Sneak Peek for 2021 Now, to close, a sneak peek at what we are working on for 2021: Multi-User Edition of HPCBOX Although HPCBOX was born due to the need for a personal computing kind of experience when it comes to supercomputing, some cases, for example, when users sign up for 1-3 year reserved instances from the cloud infrastructure provider and don’t necessarily need the enhanced workflow functionality of optimizing infrastructure costs, have slightly different requirements. Since the hardware is going to be powered on for the entire period of the reserved instance, it makes sense to have a traditional cluster setup with multiple users on the same HPCBOX cluster. To facilitate this scenario, we have been hard at work on releasing a final version of our HPCBOX Multi-User edition. Sign Up for a Preview Here HPCBOX Linux Virtual Desktop (LVD?) Although Drizti’s core area of expertise is HPC, because of our experience with Microsoft Azure, we’ve also helped some customers deploy their Windows Virtual Desktop pools, especially due to the need for many of them to implement Work-From-Home support. We realize that not all applications are compatible with and not all users strictly use Microsoft Windows, some applications work better on Linux desktops, so, we’ve started building a Linux Virtual Desktop solution for deployment on the cloud, specifically, Microsoft Azure, for now. This solution is mainly targeting those users and administrators who are just looking for a turn-key shared/dedicated standalone Linux Desktop and not necessarily a distributed HPC cluster. Sign up here to get on the preview list Will HPCBOX be available on Amazon AWS in 2021? Well, this is only a sneak peek section into 2021, so, can't say Yes or No to this one! That’s a wrap for 2020. Drizti wishes everyone Happy Holidays and a Wonderful and Healthy 2021!![]() Author Dev S. Founder and CTO, Drizti Inc |