Scientific research

Nowadays scientific research sector is requesting higher and higher computing power. Mathematical modeling of complex problems and the following computer simulation are located between theoretical and experimental approach in different field of research.

Simulations allowed to fulfil experiments on computer reducing time consuming, costs and number of real experiments. High computation power became of fundamental importance in cost and time consuming reduction but also in facing, in a realistic way, problems with major complexity.

Main High Performance Computing systems users are: universities, research centres, big industries, government institutes and defence centres.

Computer clusters has been created in the middle of the 90's and they diffused first of all in the academic environment. The Beowulf's project developed in 1994 at the NASA's CESDIS Institute demonstrated that it was the ripe time to create supercomputers even of small dimensions using commodity hardware which were became, by that time, standard and mostly open-source. The whole reaching remarkable level of performance with restrain investments comparing with traditional supercomputers used at that time.

Since that time computer clusters technology bacame more and more available and represents today the main architecture to realize supercomputers at the all levels.

HPC systems actaully used in the research field offer an optimal price/quality ratio, high scalability, updating and maintenance facilities, standard software environment, open-source parallel computing and calculation resources management tools.

Some examples of research sectors using HPC systems

• Aeronautics
• Molecular biology
• Computational Chemistry
• Drug Discovery
• Geology
• Graphics and Visualization
• Engineering
• Mathematics
• Meteorology
• Material sciences
• Statistics and Economics
• Visualization

Aethia has been operating since 2000 on the Italian market and it is one of the first company which proposed the cluster computing technology.

It is specialized in the realization of complete and ready to use systems, offering flexible support services during all deployment phases and system use, including fitting and development of parallel applications.

We pay attention to optimize costs, maximizing computing performance as well as getting into proportion systems, dimensioning the basic system to the available budgets and to allow easy implementation in time.

Aethia has developed a specific expertise in HPC solution field for scientific research and has established during several years collaborations with universities and research centres all over Italy.

Some examples of software tested on our HPC systems

ADF, AMBER, Crystal, Fluent, Gaussian, LS-Dyna, Matlab, MOE, NAMD/VMD, Quantum ESPRESSO, R, RAMS, Sax, VisIVO, WRF