NOV Goes All-In on Cloud HPC With Rescale to Unlock Engineering Productivity & Manage Growth

Leading the Future of Energy by Reimagining Computing


Global leader in oil and gas and renewable energy, NOV uses advanced computer-aided
engineering (CAE) simulation to design and test new technologies pumps, regulators, and
drill heads. NOV operates in 600+ locations across six continents, operating across multiple
business units that serve a range of equipment manufacturing and services from oil and
gas to renewable energy. NOV relies on high performance computing (HPC) resources to
get accurate predictions on safety, durability, and economic viability of new products before
they reach production operations. As the company expanded, so did the demands on their
fixed on-premises infrastructure. This led NOV to evaluate cloud as a flexible solution to their
growing and varying workload needs and maintain their competitive advantage in R&D.

Betting on Cloud to Optimize and Accelerate Engineering

NOV’s computational needs quickly outpaced the capacity of their rapidly aging on-prem clusters, at times leading to a simulation job backlog of 300+ days. The cost of purchasing physical hardware to handle their design optimization workloads would have taken months to implement. Beyond growing capacity and performance requirements, NOV’s expanding portfolio of R&D software led to increased complexity and cost.

NOV’s engineering systems team in charge of enabling R&D engineers with hardware and software explored Rescale as a potential cloud HPC solution. During their evaluation, the NOV engineering and IT leaders discovered that Rescale could help them increase their overall computing capabilities and productivity. Prompted by urgent project needs and a growing backlog, NOV decided to deploy some test workloads on The Rescale ScaleX platform. Within 7 days, NOV’s scientists and engineers had access to HPC resources on-demand, and ensured each team had the optimal hardware across multiple cloud providers for the best cost-performance. For example, their computational fluid dynamics workloads (STAR-CCM+) performed well on Azure hardware with high interconnect while finite element analysis (Abaqus) performed well hardware with high memory. By optimizing their software workloads, NOV can simulate products faster and to a higher fidelity resulting in increased safety and reliability. As they brought on more engineers, projects, and software, Rescale’s application management capabilities improved existing licenses utilization and ensured all applications were installed and up-to-date automatically.

From Unblocking Bottlenecks to Unlocking Business Growth


NOV’s cloud migration of their HPC operations transformed their simulation and analysis
practice from a bottleneck of engineering productivity to an accelerator of R&D projects
across the company. With Rescale, they were able to quickly process their backlog and move
onto new initiatives like artificial intelligence for predictive maintenance and digital twin.
On top of new innovation, As sources and best practices for energy production continue to
evolve, organizations like NOV that have computational flexibility and agility will stay one step
ahead.