Cycle Computing is a company that provides software for orchestrating computing and storage resources in

cloud In meteorology, a cloud is an aerosol consisting of a visible mass of miniature liquid droplets, frozen crystals, or other particles suspended in the atmosphere of a planetary body or similar space. Water or various other chemicals may co ...

environments. The flagship product is CycleCloud, which supports

Amazon Web Services Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Amazon that provides Software as a service, on-demand cloud computing computing platform, platforms and Application programming interface, APIs to individuals, companies, and gover ...

Google Compute Engine Google Compute Engine (GCE) is the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) component of Google Cloud Platform which is built on the global infrastructure that runs Google's search engine, Gmail, YouTube and other services. Google Compute Engine enabl ...

Microsoft Azure Microsoft Azure, often referred to as Azure ( , ), is a cloud computing platform operated by Microsoft for application management via around the world-distributed data centers. Microsoft Azure has multiple capabilities such as software as a ...

, and internal infrastructure. The CycleCloud orchestration suite manages the provisioning of cloud infrastructure, orchestration of workflow execution and job queue management, automated and efficient data placement, full process monitoring and logging, within a secure process flow.

History

Cycle Computing was founded in 2005. Its original offerings were based around the

HTCondor HTCondor is an open-source high-throughput computing software framework for coarse-grained distributed parallelization of computationally intensive tasks. It can be used to manage workload on a dedicated cluster of computers, or to farm out wor ...

scheduler and focused on maximizing the effectiveness of internal resources. Cycle Computing offered support for HTCondor as well as CycleServer, which provided metascheduling, reporting, and management tools for HTCondor resources. Early customers spanned a number of industries, including insurance, pharmaceutical, manufacturing, and academia. With the advent of large public cloud offerings, Cycle Computing expanded its tools to allow customers to make use of dynamically provisioned cloud environments. Key technologies developed include the ability to validate that resources were correctly added in the cloud (patent awarded in 2015), the ability to easily manage data placement and consistency, the ability to support multiple cloud providers within a single workflow, and other technologies. On August 15, 2017,

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

announced its acquisition of Cycle Computing.

Large runs

In April 2011, Cycle Computing announced “Tanuki”, a 10,000 core Amazon Web Services cluster used by Genentech. In September 2011, a Cycle Computing HPC cluster called Nekomata (Japanese for "Monster Cat") was renting out at $1279/hour, offering 30,472 processor cores with 27TB of memory and 2PB of storage. An unnamed pharmaceutical company used the cluster for 7 hours, paying $9000, for a molecular modeling task. In April 2012, Cycle Computing announced that, working in collaboration with scientific software-writing company Schrödinger, it had screened 21 million compounds in less than three hours using a 50,000-core cluster. In November 2013, Cycle Computing announced that, working in collaboration with scientific software-writing company Schrödinger, it had helped Mark Thompson, a professor of chemistry at the

University of Southern California The University of Southern California (USC, SC, or Southern Cal) is a Private university, private research university in Los Angeles, California, United States. Founded in 1880 by Robert M. Widney, it is the oldest private research university in C ...

, sort through about 205,000 compounds to search for the right compound to build a new generation of inexpensive and highly efficient solar panels. The job took less than a day and cost $33,000 in total. The computing cluster used 156,000 cores spread across 8 regions and had a peak capacity of 1.21

petaFLOPS In computing, floating point operations per second (FLOPS, flops or flop/s) is a measure of computer performance, useful in fields of scientific computations that require floating-point calculations. For such cases, it is a more accurate meas ...

. In November 2014, Cycle Computing worked with a researcher at

HGST HGST, Inc. (Hitachi Global Storage Technologies) was a manufacturer of hard disk drives, solid-state drives, and external storage products and services. It was initially a subsidiary of Hitachi, formed through its acquisition of IBM's disk d ...

to run a hard drive simulation workload. The computation would have taken over a month on internal resources, but completed in 7 hours running on 70,000 cores in Amazon Web Services, at a cost of less than $6,000. In September 2015, Cycle Computing and the Broad Institute announced a 50,000 core cluster to run on Google Compute Engine.

References

External links

* {{official website Cloud computing providers