Personal HPC

So, we build rocksolid clusters that fit under your desk

Molecular dynamics, Monte Carlo simulations, DFT, First Principles… just download or write your code and execute it, parallel, on your dedicated Personal high performance computer.

Personal HPC have the size and simplicity of workstations combined to the powerfulness of your medium-sized cluster. You choose your linux distribution, no dedicated I/O subsystems like InfiniBand nor climatisation.

For illustration purpose, a physical chemistry lab in Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, recently bought the following HPC Gamma solution for 9820 €:

4 x     processeurs AMD OPTERON 6300 Series 16 cores each,
          2.3 to 3.0 GHz, 32 nm, socket G34
32 x   8 GB DDR3 RAM GB ECC Registred 1333 MHz = 256 GB
1 x     Hard drive SATA 3 TB Server edition
1 x     4U format chassis and associated motherboard
2 x     GB/s ethernet

In details...

The codes we designed our HPC Gamma for are often parallelized by researchers, not computer scientists.

It's often done through the simple OPENMP, which has to be run over one single processor because of the shared memory needed. We thus chose the AMD OPTERON products. If you want 64 cores in a single body, then OPTERON's the best choice. Note that OPTERON cores are real, while Intel cores are hyperthreaded, i.e. virtual, fully enabled only if you write low level instruction codes.

We carefully chose our RAM to be fast, reliable and certified for heavy use, 24/24, 7/7..

The same criteria apply to our hard drive. Certified to read/write all day long.

The chassis and its associated motherboard may come from various companies, mainly TYAN and SUPERMICRO, depending on the quantity of RAM one wants, the addition of graphic cards, ...

The 4U format is chosen to be compatible with rackmounts while perfect to fit under a desk.

Every single cores being in the same motherboard in our HPC Gamma, complex and expensive I/O systems (Infiniband etc.) are useless. 2 GB/s ethernet with link aggregation is enough for the user to communicate with the HPC Gamma.

We can also respond to your storage needs with Sigma solutions

Sigma Mini & Sigma

To backup 10 TB, we made the Sigma Mini:
It's so simple you'll forget it. We install it for you in order everything to be backed-up automatically at your prefered frequency. 2 GB/s with link aggregation in a 1U format you may hide wherever you want (in a rack or just on a desk). Just forget it. Basic configuration: with 6 TB in RAID 0 for 1210 € HT.

For large or huge amounts of data, we made Sigma:
e.g. the whole lab (100s of TB). Please contact us for these special needs.

About us...

We're researchers and entrepreneurs.
Two of us are working fulltime as postdoctoral fellow in academic research. We're specialists in Molecular dynamics, Monte Carlo algorithms, First Principles calculations and Lattice Boltzmann simulations for material science and chemical pysics.
The idea behind Personal HPC comes from the experience of one of us who wanted to build the perfect machine for its own theoretical and numerical developments on classical density functional theory while he was a postdoctoral fellow.