CIQ Fuzzball empowers researchers to innovate faster
CIQ, the company leading the next generation of software infrastructure, is introducing new capabilities to its Fuzzball computing and data management platform for performance intensive computing (PIC). Individual researchers focused on performing critical work in science and innovation can now converge on world-changing discoveries faster.
Fuzzball is research ready, with pre-built workflow templates that allow researchers to work with the tools they already depend upon.
Examples include PyTorch, Stable Diffusion and Tensorflow for AI; OpenRadioss and GROMACS for simulation and modeling; RStudio Server and Jupyter Notebooks for programming; and MATLAB for broad scientific use cases.
Legacy high performance computing (HPC) infrastructure doesn’t stand up to today’s demands for PIC, according to the company.
In contrast, Fuzzball is a modern, PIC platform that helps researchers maximize speed to innovation, no computer science degree required.
With Fuzzball, scientists and innovators no longer need specialized knowledge of computer systems to run their workloads. Fuzzball’s graphical user interface (GUI) abstracts away the complexity of workflow design and execution, helping researchers and engineers in a variety of fields and industries to rapidly deploy a workload without computer science expertise.
Fuzzball also eliminates the time innovators spend defining their research workloads, offering example workflows to help users get started. In addition, Fuzzball’s standardized, human-readable workload file format enables users to copy and paste workload files from one Fuzzball cluster to another without any rework.
“Over the two past years, CIQ has been working with customers in a limited preview of Fuzzball across enterprise and public sectors,” said Gregory Kurtzer, CEO of CIQ. “We heard from customers and the community that researchers are burdened with becoming Linux and infrastructure experts in order to do their research and this is affecting their productivity and ability to meet their demands of innovation. While organizations cumulatively have spent many billions of dollars for their computing resources, these systems are based on a legacy architecture and no longer meet the demands of today’s advanced use-cases. HPC architecture has been the same for the past 30 years; that all changes with Fuzzball.”
Fuzzball allows customers to build computing-focused workflows consisting of jobs pipelined together, all operating within their respective containerized environments. Job pipelines are constructed as acyclic graphs, and as a result pipelines can be linear, parallel or any combination of the two. Jobs themselves can also be serial, multi-system parallel (MPI, GasNet, etc.) or arrays.
Another unique aspect of Fuzzball’s architecture is its approach to data management. Rather than depend on manual data movement, lifecycle and staging, Fuzzball automates data management while maintaining security policies and auditability.
Fuzzball will ingress the required data for a given workflow into a file-based volume, and after the job is completed, the resulting identified data can be egressed back into external file or object-based storage.
According to the company, Fuzzball abstracts the infrastructure and automates the process of running complex workflows which drives efficiency of innovation, development and individuals while removing infrastructure-specific dependencies enabling greater levels of portability, cost effectiveness, and collaboration.
Fuzzball is available now in on-premises deployments for researchers, engineers, scientists, and innovators who want a modern PIC platform to speed the path to discovery and innovation.
For more information about this news, visit https://ciq.com.