X-ISS: Accelerating Research and Development

As technologies are evolving exponentially, the size and amount of data that organizations must work with are growing at an unprecedented rate. Data is the backbone of such groundbreaking scientific discoveries and innovations that improve the quality of life for billions of people around the globe. On a closer note, HPC is the foundation for scientific, industrial, and societal advancements. In an ever-competitive landscape, companies need to be faster and better at getting their product to market. For instance, with the pandemic, there was, and continues to be, a big push for vaccine development-related research. HPC is essential to scientists and engineers in enabling this acceleration. However, HPC is complex to set up and manage. This is where X-ISS steps into the game. Headquartered in Houston, TX, X-ISS is a business-driven HPC consulting company that provides exceptional technical computing solutions through its management and analytics solutions.

In a nutshell, X-ISS is all about making HPC easy for users. X-ISS’s role in working with customers is to integrate, manage, and maintain HPC cluster systems, as well as monitor, report, and deliver analytics that are important to HPC and allows the users to focus on delivering results better and quicker.

The company’s ManagedHPC solution gets the clusters operating efficiently and quickly for the users. “Our flagship and most popular offering—ManagedHPC—is full-service managed support, where the users can focus on their work and any issue or request related to the cluster,” explains Deepak Khosla, CEO, X-ISS. As part of the service, the company provides reactive and proactive issue management, user request management, and analytics through theirDecisionHPC product. The latter provides usage analysis and helps improve utilization as well as capacity planning. Other offerings from X-ISS also include ProjectHPC to help clients get specific HPC projects done including cluster deployment, application installs, remote visualization, etc.

The company’s ManagedHPC offering is what makes it stand out from the crowd. The solution is unique as it provides end-to-end support for clients’ systems in their environment. X-ISS becomes the single point of contact for any issues on the cluster – all the way from the hardware to the application.

X-ISS has over 20 years of practical and valuable experience the team brings to the table to help customers efficiently & effectively. Over the years, the company has assisted a variety of customers in managing their computing to make research and engineering more efficient. An instance that portrays the company’s value proposition is when the team assisted Rivian, an electric vehicle maker and automotive technology company move its HPC simulation workload to the AWS cloud. Rivian relies on advanced modeling and simulation techniques to meet accelerated engineering schedules. Using high compute capacity, simulations enable engineers to test new concepts and bring their designs to market quickly. Recently, Rivian found that its on-premise research and development information technology infrastructure could not keep up with its performance needs. X-ISS worked with Rivian to move its HPC simulation workload from on-prem to AWS cloud resulting in significant productivity and capability increases. With the X-ISS team, Rivian navigated the various challenges and delivered increased functionality to the engineers.

In another instance, Cummins, a multinational engine manufacturer, was able to providea very productiveand effective HPC environment to their global users. They did this by leveraging X-ISS’sManagedHPCservice thatwas able to providethe critical stable and scalable support structure essential for success.

X-ISS is a privately owned business, certified as a Minority Business Enterprise (MBE) by the National Minority Supplier Development Council (NMSDC) and as a Historically Underutilized Business (HUB) by the State of Texas. Today, the company has a clear roadmap and a well-defined set of goals to pursue. “We will continue expanding our offerings including Cloud HPC while also expanding our market segments to life sciences and higher education with a much deeper partner eco-system,” concludes Khosla.