Category: Amazon API Gateway

HPC systems are traditionally access through a Command Line Interface (CLI) where the users submit and manage their computational jobs. Depending on their experience and sophistication, the CLI can be a daunting experience for users not accustomed in using it. Fortunately, the cloud offers many other options for users to submit and manage their computational jobs. In this blog post we will cover how to create a serverless API to interact with an HPC system in the the cloud built with AWS ParallelCluster.

Playtech mathematicians and game designers need accurate, detailed game play simulation results to create fun experiences for players. While software developers have been able to iterate on code in an agile manner for many years, for non-analytical solutions, mathematicians have had to rely on slow CPU-bound Monte-Carlo simulations, waiting, as software engineers once did, many hours or overnight to get the results of their latest changes. These statistics are also required as evidence of game fairness in the highly regulated online gaming business. Playtech has developed an AWS Lambda Serverless based solution that provides massive burst compute performance that allows game simulations in minutes rather than hours. This post goes into the details of the architecture, as well as some examples of using the system in our development and operations.