RMSC and ESRI collaborate on HPC Cloud Apps

12 July 2010, 2:41pm

BUTTE, MONTANA, 12 July 2010 - The Rocky Mountain Supercomputing Centers, Inc. (RMSC) is collaborating with the world's leading GIS software company, ESRI, to leverage the HPC Cloud paradigm in real-world geospatial applications. RMSC is a leading provider of High Performance Computing (HPC) Cloud technology, which offers significant advantages in scalability, performance and pricing over other cloud platforms.

"The cloud computing paradigm is the future of GIS," said Earl J. Dodd, RMSC Executive Director. "HPC Cloud technology has the potential to scale-up GIS software and boost its volumetrics to solve geospatial data processing challenges much faster than previously possible."

Under the collaborative agreement with ESRI, RMSC is running ESRI ArcGIS 10 software in a dynamic HPC Cloud environment to evaluate processing capacity of existing models and expand ArcGIS throughput and performance capabilities for advanced geospatial projects. Some of these GIS modeling and simulation applications require processing terabytes of data in (near) real-time. RMSC will examine a variety of techniques and configurations that make it possible to scale-up ArcGIS 10 and maximize its performance in the HPC Cloud.

"ESRI's collaboration with the Rocky Mountain Supercomputing Centers allows us to efficiently and quickly determine areas to address when customers with advanced GIS needs migrate to the HPC Cloud," said S.J. Camarata, ESRI Director, Corporate Strategy. "Having the ability to stress and run the most advanced GIS models and visualization at RMSC will truly deliver on our message that ArcGIS 10 transforms the way people use GIS."

"The Elastic Compute Cloud has been applied to some GIS applications," explained Dodd. "But the HPC Cloud that RMSC has created can significantly reduce processing time with expanded model sizes, especially in critical geospatial applications such as 3D modeling, visualization and simulation
supporting national security, emergency management and policy decision support."

A non-profit Montana corporation, RMSC is a public-private partnership involving the State of Montana, IBM, Microsoft, Adaptive Computing and NextIO. RMSC was created with the goal of driving local and regional economic development by making on-demand supercomputing available to commercial businesses (especially small- to medium-sized businesses), government agencies, academic institutions and tribal enterprises. RMSC offers Supercomputing Platforms as a Service (SPaaS) and professional expertise to help eliminate barriers of use when moving into the HPC Cloud.

Opening its doors in July 2009, RMSC applies its particular type of cloud computing to applications in the diverse fields of energy, agriculture, manufacturing and climate change, among others. Already, RMSC is involved in modeling complex carbon management and global food security issues for the USDA's International Production and Assessment Division. The Center also provides 24x7 supercomputing support for weather forecasting for renewable energy resource management organizations.

For more information on how the Rocky Mountain Supercomputing Centers is
demonstrating HPC for the New Main Street, please visit the link below.

Rocky Mountain Supercomputing Centers, Inc.

Geo: International