The Challenge

NEEDING A MAJOR UPGRADE TO MEET DEMANDFor Andrew Witzig, the president of ShearwaterTechnology, solving impossibly complexmultiphysics problems is what he does best. Buthe didn’t need a supercomputer to tell him thatthe math behind his small engineering firm wasno longer adding up. Andrew was in a tough spot: He was having to pass on jobs because the modeling andsimulations required were just too demanding forhis current setup. And when he did take on that work, he had to enlist a cloud HPC service to get the job done, and that never came cheap. It was time for an upgrade that could take Shearwater Technology to the next level. But, being an expert in this field, Andrew knew that he couldn’t do this alone. He needed a partner that would walk with him every step of the way. What Andrew needed was a turnkey, high performance computing solution that could hit the ground running on day one. A system powerful enough to meet the rising demand of hisclients for years to come. And a partner who could provide ongoing support through the yearsto come. Andrew needed NZO Cloud.

The Solution

When Andrew called NZO Cloud, it was immediately evident he had found the answer to his problems. They took the time to listen to his specific needs and crafted a custom private cloud and HPC instance based on the latest Intel Xeon Scalable series processors, specifically tailored to his requirements.

With a 57-step testing and integration process, the hardware, software, and networking powering this new instance was guaranteed to seamlessly integrate with Andrew’s programs.But it wasn’t until NZO Cloud arrived that Andrew was really impressed.

Shearwater Technology

Shearwater Technology is a privately owned, Illinois-based engineering firm that specializes in modeling, simulation, and analysis for government and commercial sectors.

AN HPC SOLUTION THAT QUADRUPLES COMPUTING POTENTIALAndrew’s new private cloud + HPC instance didn’t just enhance his business, it completelytransformed it. Having an onsite cluster meant he not only had the headroom for existing jobsbut could compete at a whole new level.

That expanded potential has helped Andrew significantly diversify his revenue streams. And what’s just as exciting is he’s no longer stuck paying exorbitant rates to a cloud HPC service. He can run his new cluster day and night and reap every benefit.

But it’s not just the volume of data that Andrew can provide, the quality of his analysis is far beyond what Shearwater Technology was able to supply before, too.

“Some of our work is in areas that we wouldn’t have necessarily either bid or even approached our customer with previously,” Andrew explains. “We knew we didn’thave the capability to even tackle a problem of that complexity or that size. But now we have the capability to run these large-scale problems, and run multiplesof them concurrently, to provide customers with a larger amount of data than we ever could previously.”

We've logged more than 650,000 core hours of processing on the cluster in ten months,” he says. “That would have cost somewhere around $71,000 on an HPC service. With the computing resources we had previously, we might have logged somewhere around 160,000 core hours. That represents at least a four times increase in the amount of data products we've been able to provide our customers in the last year.

Andrew Witzig President, Shearwater Technology