Introducing Rescale Academic Essentials: Turnkey, Multi-Cloud HPC and AI to Advance Higher Ed Research in Science and Engineering

Today, Rescale announced Rescale Academic Essentials, a new offering for higher education institutions to enable scientific, engineering, and other research computing at any scale. This platform edition is tailored and complimentary for academic institutions to augment their high performance computing solutions (HPC) for computationally-intensive workloads on the latest and most powerful computing architectures. It also offers comprehensive controls for budgets, configurations, access, data governance, and resource administration. Rescale Academic Essentials is unique among HPC offerings for higher education in that it is a complete, turnkey multi-cloud solution with a catalog of over 1,000 pre-installed research applications optimized for accelerated discovery across a variety of research domains.  

Now that computing is critical in advancing research in virtually every domain, universities are exploring how to expand their resources with the cloud while maintaining necessary oversight. A typical HPC center may have hundreds of researchers running thousands of unique applications, making it increasingly difficult for HPC centers to manage their vast software catalogs that leverage the growing spectrum of new hardware architectures. 

“University research drives foundational scientific and engineering discovery that advances technological advancement,” said Matt McKee, Chief Operating Officer at Rescale. “Rescale Academic Essentials enormously simplifies access to the latest and most advanced cloud high performance computing technologies within a platform that easily fits within existing IT operations and budgets.”

A Solution for Academia’s Unique Computing Requirements

Rescale Academic Essentials addresses many challenges of providing cloud based HPC capabilities to a diverse set of research users. New computing technologies are advancing rapidly to keep pace with the demands of more advanced applications. Traditionally, Higher Education HPC centers have been challenged to adopt the latest architectures and applications as soon as they’re released and then provision them with the scale and control needed in academic environments. 

Augmenting on-premises HPC clusters with cloud resources solves capacity, obsolescence, and specialized hardware access challenges for universities. However, cloud HPC can introduce new challenges to many HPC center managers in higher education. Hybrid HPC on-premises and cloud environments can dramatically increase management complexity and introduce new costs that can be difficult to understand and manage. 

Rescale’s full-stack and intuitive platform democratizes access to large-scale computing for any researcher, department, or campus, anywhere. Universities can leverage Rescale’s essential compute job submission features through a user-friendly GUI or via a scheduler-like interface, such as SLURM, to provide users with a flexible and familiar batch submission environment. They can also use Rescale’s API to create integrations to launch HPC jobs in the cloud. Rescale’s unified platform allows users to use cloud HPC with minimal or no additional training. 

Rescale’s administrative controls and dashboards provide clear visibility and control of budgets and costs across users, projects, and teams. Rescale is well suited to university budget structures and allows for granular control of spending, even on a monthly basis. With the Rescale Economic Dashboard, administrators can see an overview of the total spend across each workspace and workload, including a breakout of hardware versus software licensing costs. Rescale’s budgeting and analytics tools ensure that administrators can track funds and tie compute credit consumption back to specific grants for research projects. 

Rescale Academic Essentials delivers on-demand access to more than a thousand applications, from computer-aided engineering physics solvers to computational chemistry codes, and instant access to the latest HPC and GPU hardware infrastructures to run them cost-effectively and performantly. Users can select from Rescale’s infrastructure and hardware partners including AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle, and other specialized cloud providers based on performance, cost, and sustainability goals. The Rescale Academic Essentials platform is SOC 2 Type 2 certified and immediately meets or exceeds HIPAA requirements upon deployment.

“Rescale has made it possible to explore options with improved ease of use to extend our on-premises services, include HPC-as-a-service cloud resources, optimize the cost of our infrastructure, and the ability to move jobs between on-premises and multiple cloud providers.” said Alan Sill, Managing Director of High Performance Computing Center at Texas Tech University. 

Key Features of Rescale Academic Essentials

Complimentary Platform: The Rescale Academic Essentials edition license is complimentary for universities. University customers using the Rescale Academic Essentials edition pay only for the infrastructure resources they consume from their preferred cloud service provider. HPC center directors and administrators benefit from many of Rescale’s cloud automation capabilities, making it seamless and cost-effective to harness any leading cloud service providers without having to set up and manage multiple vendor accounts. 

Rescale API and Integrations: Rescale Academic Essentials will be available through Rescale’s GUI, API, and scheduler interfaces to ensure seamless integration with on-premises resources coupled with scalable cloud HPC services. The API maximizes flexibility and customization, making it easy for universities to tailor their transition to the cloud for their needs.

HPC Hardware: Users have access to a vast portfolio of the latest multi-cloud high-performance computing architectures offered by our cloud service provider partners, helping them tackle complex simulations, data analytics, and research projects with ease. 

HPC Applications: Rescale Academic Essentials offers a library of 1,000+ scientific and engineering simulation applications and artificial intelligence workflows. Open-source software is included, and connections to commercial software licenses are available as an optional add-on. HPC centers can install custom software through Spack and containers to augment Rescale’s library and tap into their existing HPC infrastructure.

Scalability: Rescale Academic Essentials scales with the computational demands of universities. Support everything from small-scale experiments for an individual researcher to large-scale computational studies run by an academic department. Universities can also build additional services that connect with Rescale’s API.

Control and Oversight: HPC administrators get complete management of costs and transparency into how computing resources are used. In addition to the API and scheduler integrations, Rescale Academic Essentials provides a companion organizational interface with administrative controls that can map to the complex web of grant funding that researchers can use to pay for computing resources. 

Support and Resources: Rescale provides documentation and tutorials for the Rescale API and an open-source SLURM interface. Rescale Academic Essentials provides basic support through access to the Rescale Help Center, with a live support package as an option.

Empowering Higher Education with High Performance Computing

In a rapidly evolving digital landscape, the need for computational power is greater than ever. From complex simulations and data analysis to machine learning and artificial intelligence, the demand for supercomputing resources is accelerating for students, researchers, and scientists. 

With Rescale Academic Essentials, we are committed to bridging the gap between educational institutions, their on-premises HPC, and the new possibilities of cloud-based supercomputing to foster innovation and research. 

Supercomputing is essential to biomedical research, climate modeling, materials science, fluid dynamics, mathematical modeling, data analytics, and many other disciplines. 

Rescale Academic Essentials provides universities with a gateway to access powerful multi-cloud HPC infrastructures and applications easily. Rescale unlocks innovation potential for students, researchers, and educators advancing knowledge with the latest tools for computational science, computational engineering, and artificial intelligence.