Virtualizing Science, Engineering, and Technical Applications at VMworld

I’ve talked to a lot of customers in the past year who have islands of unvirtualized infrastructure within their organizations. Examples include insurance companies running risk analyses, digital content creation companies rendering movie frames, electronic design companies running simulations of chip designs, life sciences organizations running a variety of genomics and other applications, and government agencies running security-related simulations and other workloads.

If your organization runs such workloads and you are interested in hearing how they can be virtualized, consider voting for the following VMworld proposal. Public votes can be cast here (free registration required) and voting closes on June 8th.

1984 A self-service model for supporting engineering, scientific and other technical applications in a vCloud environment

As the use of virtualization technologies continues to increase in organizations, there is a class of workloads that to date has been left largely unvirtualized. These technical or High Performance Computing (HPC) applications often exist as unvirtualized islands of computation within the larger organization,  often separate from Corporate IT. These workloads are typically not virtualized due to performance concerns and due to lack of information about how one might construct a virtualized cluster environment to support such applications.

In this presentation we will briefly discuss the main value propositions for virtualizing such workloads and will show that a large class of these HPC applications can be virtualized now with little performance overhead. We will then describe a proven vCloud-based solution architecture that provides a self-service portal for research and engineering groups to dynamically instantiate compute clusters while allowing the underlying hardware to remain under the control of Corporate IT. This solution has been deployed and is currently in use at a major global pharmaceutical firm. This solution is general in nature and has applicability across a wide range of business types.