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!

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:

1. Simcenter Nastran
2. 3DS ABAQUS suite
3. ANSYS LS-DYNA
4. ANSYS System Coupling (both Fluent and CFX)
5. Microsoft Windows desktop experience

and many other Open Source codes.
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.
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HPCBOX supports the entire portfolio of Microsoft Azure HPC instance sizes in 2020, i.e., HB2, HB, HC, NC, ND, NV.

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.

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.

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

Learn how to accelerate innovation with turnkey #HPC on #AzureMktPlace. Read the guest blog from @Drizti_Inc – https://t.co/BXWNpB1u7f pic.twitter.com/AdsDeSzbAC

— Azure Marketplace (@AzureMktPlace) July 15, 2020

Learn how @Drizti_Inc aims to democratize #HPC with Microsoft #Azure! https://t.co/Fui6hvCubJ pic.twitter.com/OFmJaJqtnS

— Tech Community (@MSTCommunity) July 16, 2020

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.​

We had a wonderful time at the DMZ accelerator and graduated in 2020. Thanks to folks at DMZ for all the support.

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.

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.
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Well, this is only a sneak peek section into 2021, so, can’t say Yes or No to this one!