It’s also a great example of how technology innovation cascades though multiple businesses, enabling new opportunities at every step. The modernization has enabled the international technology firm to improve availability, manageability, and reliability, with “exponential” increases in performance of 50 petabytes of storage supporting its full-stack global HPC as a Service (HPCaaS) and other offerings. Much credit goes to what Schwan calls a “technology leapfrog event” - replacing hard disk-based legacy storage with innovative, all-flash storage service from Vast Data, powered by Intel Optane storage and memory. Eighteen months later, the company is servicing business from a diverse range of HPC disciplines. The goal: continue to provide top service for existing customers while attracting different types of new users of HPC cloud services. So in 2019 DUG set out to expand its focus and change all that. You need a lot of your own HPC expertise.” But if you want to build HPC, you have to do a lot of things yourself.

“If you want to build Netflix, they’re terrific. “Traditional cloud providers are not focused on HPC,” says Phil Schwan, chief technology officer at DUG. Yet a couple of years ago, in the continued downturn in the energy industry, the company spotted a new opportunity: providing medical and genetic researchers, astrophysicists, and others with affordable, on-demand HPC services to handle analysis of large, complex data sets. Providing the supercomputing and storage muscle needed for massive oil and gas searches is a bedrock business for DUG Technology, an international service provider with offices in Perth, Houston, London, and Kuala Lumpur.

A typical project processes a petabyte of data (1,000 terabytes), which can quickly balloon 5x, 10x, or more, and often lasts a year or longer. Energy exploration and high-performance computing (HPC) are made for each other.

Vast plash