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Liberty University Engineering Invests in Cloud-Native HPC to Enable New R&D Capabilities
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
- Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Data Management Platforms
Applicable Industries
- Education
Applicable Functions
- Discrete Manufacturing
- Product Research & Development
Use Cases
- Manufacturing System Automation
- Predictive Maintenance
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
The Challenge
Liberty University's engineering program, one of the fastest growing schools within the university, required computation-intensive R&D and faced challenges providing adequate high performance computing (HPC) resources. The HPC software and hardware required varied greatly across a wide range of engineering programs, including civil, electrical, industrial, mechanical, and computer engineering. Combining that variation with the ongoing need for support posed a challenge for the IT team, so they began to search for a solution that could quickly scale to the needs of the school. They had concerns around cost and their ability to deliver it quickly. When they explored their specific requirements they knew they were short on personnel to implement and maintain a solution on-premises, so they explored options for cloud HPC.
About The Customer
Liberty University is on a mission to educate values-driven students in an environment that encourages innovation and impacts tomorrow’s society. In order to empower student and faculty researchers and continue to attract future leaders, the Liberty School of Engineering invests in curriculum and tools that enable cutting-edge research projects. Adapting to the demands of a quickly evolving industry landscape, the university has woven the practice of simulation-based design throughout its various disciplines. By applying simulation and other computational engineering approaches to its classes, competitions, and clubs, the school hopes to continue growing its reputation for producing high-quality research and top graduates.
The Solution
Liberty’s IT and Engineering teams searched for a solution that could easily scale and support any number of students and an array of computational needs like batch HPC workloads and cloud desktops for visualization and pre/post processing. Once they decided that cloud was their preferred strategy, they began to assess the work required to build their own cloud services on top of a public cloud service provider. In this process, the team was working to enable a specialized HPC software whose vendor had experience working with Rescale and recommended it as a comprehensive and easy-to-deploy HPC solution for that software. It was determined that Rescale could also support all of Liberty’s other HPC applications while providing prebuilt IT management tooling that would save the team significant implementation time.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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