Alces Flight: Effortless HPC is Born (Finally)

Posted On: Jun 1, 2016

100s of Science & HPC Apps Now Available in AWS Marketplace

Alces Flight makes it easy for any researcher to spin up any size High Performance Computing (HPC) cluster in the AWS Cloud, taking their compute projects from 0 to 60 in a few minutes.

The Alces Flight portfolio of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings provide researchers with on-demand HPC clusters or ‘self-service supercomputers’ in minutes. With hundreds of science and HPC apps ready to compute and available in AWS Marketplace, Alces Flight helps you automatically create a research-ready environment that compliments AWS Elastic Block Storage, S3 simple storage and EC2 compute resources in the AWS Cloud.  

After designing and managing hundreds of HPC workflows for national and academic supercomputing centers in the United Kingdom, Alces built and validated hundreds of HPC workflows tailored to researchers across most fields of science. Alces automated applications built for supercomputing centers, and is now making that catalog available in AWS Marketplace. Before Alces Flight, researchers with computationally intensive work applied for access to computing resources in a limited number of national supercomputing centers. This required months of work drafting a proposal and waiting for a response. Many applications were denied and approved researchers had to wait in a job queue, sacrificing time to scientific discovery in the process. 

With Alces Flight, researchers and scientists can quickly spin up multiple nodes with pre-installed compilers, libraries and hundreds of scientific computing applications covering nearly every domain from engineering, chemistry and genomics, to statistics and remote sensing. It uses standard AWS Elastic Block Storage, Amazon S3 simple storage and Amazon EC2 compute resources in the AWS Cloud and leverages the Amazon E2 Spot Instances market to keep costs low. In addition, Alces Flight provides console access for GUIs and visualization tools, or admin access to install packages or modify the environment to suit the specific needs of a user. 

Researchers get:

  • Instant access to 100s of science-ready catalog of popular HPC and scientific computing apps that rival those available at supercomputing centers.
  • Access to a self-service supercomputer (HPC clusters) available for use any time, from anywhere, at virtually any scale and at the lowest possible cost with Amazon EC2 Spot Instances pricing.
  • Instant on-demand access to powerful scientific computing tools that make global collaboration easy.

Get Started in 5 Steps:

  1. Create an AWS account at aws.amazon.com.
  2. Search for "Alces Flight" in the AWS Marketplace.
  3. Select “Personal HPC Compute Cluster” for delivery method and follow the AWS CloudFormation launch process, choosing simple options for the size of your cluster.
  4. Click Launch and your cluster is ready in minutes.
  5. Share your results immediately using built-in graphical collaboration tools, or instantly share the whole cluster and its data with your colleagues around the world.

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