HPC Consulting — Architecture Design and Infrastructure Strategy

Investing in high performance computing starts with reading your organisation’s compute requirements correctly. A wrong architectural decision — over- or under-sizing, the wrong storage choice, an unsuitable scheduler configuration — creates both financial and operational weight for years afterwards.

Scope of the Consulting Service

Workload Analysis

A detailed review of your current or planned compute workloads:

• Application profiles (MPI-based, GPU-heavy, I/O-bound?)
• Parallel scaling characteristics (Amdahl’s law analysis)
• Memory and storage requirements
• User profile and concurrent access scenarios
• Demand pattern (burst versus sustained load)

Architecture Design

A technical architecture proposal grounded in the workload analysis:

• Compute node type and count
• Network topology (InfiniBand versus Ethernet, fat-tree versus torus)
• Storage tier architecture (scratch, home, archive)
• Redundancy and high availability strategy
• Power and cooling budget

TCO & ROI Analysis

A total cost of ownership comparison over a five-year horizon:

Technology Selection

Vendor-neutral comparative analysis:

• CPU: AMD EPYC versus Intel Xeon
• GPU: NVIDIA H100 versus A100 versus L40S
• Storage: BeeGFS versus Lustre versus GPFS
• Scheduler: SLURM versus PBS versus LSF

Implementation Roadmap

For putting the architectural decision into practice in stages:

• Phase plan (pilot → production → expansion)
• Risk assessment and mitigation strategies
• Procurement and deployment timeline
• Acceptance criteria and benchmark targets

To shape your organisation’s HPC strategy, arrange a consulting session.