AWS Case Study: Cycle Computing and Varian

Varian, Inc. is a leading Scientific Instruments Company, with a reputation for high quality products for scientific industries. Researchers run calculation intensive monte carlo simulations of future products using partial differential equation mathematical models.

• Business Challenge: Varian needed to simulate a design for a mass spectrometer, a very compute intensive operation. The simulations required several thousand compute hours, and nearly 6 calendar weeks on an internal pool of processors. With a conference deadline for completed results looming, they needed to get results done faster.

• Solution: Rather than purchasing hardware, Varian was able to run this several week calculation in under a day using CycleCloud. By provisioning a fully secured cluster that grew to several hundred CPUs on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), CycleCloud dynamically scaled up to execute the simulation, then shut down when calculations completed.

• Lower costs to operate: CycleCloud’s pay-per-use model for fully secure, provisioned clusters removes upfront capital expenditures and the costs of an operations team, while enabling access to tremendous compute power.

• Speed to market: In Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, running a calculation on 1 machine for 100 hours costs the same as using 100 machines for 1 hour. This empowers researchers to get results and develop products faster, while only using the servers they need.

“With CycleCloud, we were able to access a supercomputer with several hundred cores for a day, obtaining our modeling results just in time for the conference presentation and avoiding the overhead of buying and managing our own computers.” Ken Newton, R&D Scientist Varian, Inc.

In summary, Varian used CycleCloud to dramatically decrease the time required to compute product design simulations, while decreasing costs. By easily provisioning a secure cluster with the encryption required to execute sensitive calculations on the cloud, Cycle- Cloud makes high performance cloud computing easy. http://www.cyclecomputing.com !