Techila

In modern research, the requirements placed on computing and data analysis are continuously increasing, which results in a need for more versatile computing. As High-Performance Computing and Big Computing grow, they need to cater to a wider audience who are not familiar with HPC technologies; users need a simple user experience.

VTT, Technical Research Centre of Finland, is the biggest multi-technological applied research organization in Northern Europe. VTT provides versatile technology solutions and research services for both domestic and foreign clients in the private and public sector. VTT has recognised widely that requirements, changes, and efficiency of computing drive innovation, competitiveness, and success.

“The need for computing is in a strong growth, particularly within new fields of research. Because of this, the vision about the most efficient computing methods and the efficiency of investments in operational computing performance are in the center of the development of enterprises. Efficiency plus innovation will be The Thing – the race for competitiveness and continuous success requires absolutely differentiation in this field too,” says VTT’s CIO Markus Ekman in Microsoft’s case study “Unlimited computing performance with Techila’s solution”.

“Techila enables harnessing tremendous amounts of computing capacity from the cloud easily and quickly. A project, which would have taken 35 years using conventional approaches was shrunk into just five days, thanks to our solution. This is a clear business benefit and enables faster time-to-market. Our solution offered a unparalleled efficiency and 2300 times acceleration,” says Tuomas Eerola, Vice President of Techila Technoloiges.

Techila makes research and development work faster and reduces the time-to-market. Ease of use and simple user experience brings HPC to every desk, which also catalyzes unforeseen product innovations. The solution’s cost model is directly linked to benefits. Techila enables assigning Azure to serve computing and integration of cloud services to form a end-to-end research platform. In this model, the user will pay only for the benefits received – that is, the computing time and performance.

Maintaining optimal operation of modern engines requires simulation of advanced models and computationally intensive data analysis. Data management throughout the product life-cycle is becoming increasingly important as companies seek new ways to strengthen their competitiveness. At the same time the usability is moving to a key role, as high-performance computing needs to cater new user groups.

Techila Technologies and Wärtsilä have joined SIMPRO to work on development of simulation-based product processes. SIMPRO is a project funded by Tekes the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation.

“In SIMPRO, I am looking forward to developing cloud innovations, which enable faster time-to-market in product development, and provide better understanding of the product life cycle aspects”, says Tuomas Eerola, Vice President of Business Development, Techila Technologies Ltd.

Techila Technologies and Wärtsilä demonstrate the potential of cloud platforms and user-centric distributed computing to product data management. The Techila middleware for distributed high-performance computing can shield users from the complexity of computing systems. Techila can enable a secure integration of Wärtsilä’s simulation and computation processes and Windows Azure cloud services to a platform, which enables development of competitive advantage around simulation-based product processes.

“I believe that this demonstration was only the first proof of concept about the simulation and calculation innovations, which we will see coming from SIMPRO project”, says Matias Aura, Project Manager, Wärtsilä Finland Oy.

Which approach provides the most applicable acceleration in Financial Engineering? Porting to GPU, use of the Techila distributed computing middleware and power from Windows Azure cloud platform, or a native rewrite for a FPGA? Christos Delivorias answers these questions in a University of Manchester Seminar on implementing financial models on GPUs, FPGAs and in the Cloud.

The case studies in acceleration of the Heston Stochastic Volatility Financial Engineering Model show that the closer to the machine level the implementation is the better the acceleration achieved. On the other hand, plain speed up factor does not provide the full picture. TCO is a key metric for many businesses and researchers.

The handicap with the specialized development approaches are the high friction and niche specialization in the implementation of code. The cost of acceleration is an important factor, and should be taken into account when assessing different solutions. This is where the Techila middleware is superior compared to the specialized development approaches. If your code is under constant development, ease of development will be a great benefit.

An interesting observation in the research presented in the University of Manchester is that a FPGA becomes saturated and plateau at a certain acceleration. Techila and GPU are still increasing.

Machine Learning experts at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven have set up a benchmarking experiment using the Microsoft Windows Azure cloud platform with the middleware of Techila Technologies. The results were compared with those obtained in a non-parallelized setup. The results show that significant analysis speed-ups can be gained when performing computational tasks in the cloud.

Machine learning (ML) techniques are becoming commonplace in business and research alike. Increasing amounts of data is being captured as a result of automatization of data collection efforts. This makes extracting insightful patterns increasingly challenging. In addition to this “data avalanche” becoming evermore overwhelming, the usage of more computationally intensive algorithms in predictive analysis tasks also gives rise to new issues and challenges, so that a Machine Learning approach typically entails a trade off between computational efficiency and predictive performance.

In recent years, however, new paradigms in analytics have been proposed geared towards solving these data and computational challenges, including cloud computing, distributed computing, and parallel computing approaches. A team headed by Professor Bart Baesens of the Department of Decision Sciences and Information Management, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven sets out to discern one of these new hypes in analytics, cloud computing, and to present a case study hereof which was performed at KU Leuven.

HPC in the Cloud spoke with Tuomas Eerola, vice president and partner at Techila, about the software of Techila Technologies and its uses:

Tuomas Eerola sees the distance between Internet and Mobile shrinking. Mobile and embedded applications and platforms are becoming richer, High-speed Interenet is becoming mobile, and developers are introducing solutions, which nobody could have dreamed of in the beginning of the Millennium. At the same time, several mobile vendors are introducing clouds, which have the potential to deliver virtually infinite capacity. Techila wants to shrink the distance between Applications and the Clouds, and enable HPC on every desk and in every pocket.

“I just want to bring fast computing and infinite scalability of compute power to whatever it is we have in our hands. Whether that is with the MacBook on my table or whether it is the fancy phone on my desk, I really don’t care.”

Many of the applications Tuomas Eerola mentioned in the discussion with HPC in the Cloud are familiar territory for cloud services: Financial Risk Management, Medical Imaging, Stochastic Simulations, Data-analysis in Geophysics,… But Eerola sees that Techila Technologies has only scratched the surface of the opportunities for next generation distributed high-performance computing. He stressed that the company’s goal is to expand the adoption of high performance resources by bringing HPC to every desk, and to every pocket. This will be a game-changer, which will really democratize HPC.

Tuomas Eerola wants to bring a positive disruption to the HPC market and enable fast computing also in applications, which have not been able to benefit of conventional server-based HPC. Mobile applications, which Techila Technologies demonstrated recently, are an excellent example of areas, which have not been able to benefit of HPC before Techila.

Cloud computing offers highly flexible and available compute capacity for a variety of applications. However, the act of provisioning those resources can be rather complicated, requiring a certain level of expertise and consequently reducing cloud adoption.

According to Eerola, ease of integration and ability to provide end-users with shileding from all complexity are key items in making HPC available to everyone. With Techila, scalable application development does not need to be a nine-month re-architecting project. The proven middleware provides built-in security, scalability and shielding from the complexity. Having these features readily available and tested can save a lot of the developer’s time and money.

Techila SDK offers Open API for Independent Software Vendors (ISV) and Systems Integrators (SI) for easy third-party software integration. The Techila Application Programming Interfaces are available free of charge to any developers who have registered in the Techila Extranet and who want to benefit of Techila in their application projects. Integration with Techila can be distributed license-free with any project. There will be a cost only when the end-user of the application benefits of Techila, when actually doing Techila-enabled computing.

Turn on the news and it will be about Eurozone crisis, Spain bank bailout, debt crisis, European Stability Mechanism (ESM), Italian bonds, the Greek crisis, and Risk Management.

HPCFinance is a 4-year multi-site Marie Curie Initial Training Network, funded by the European Commission. The multi-million Euro HPCFinance network started on May 1, 2012 and it aims to proactively train young people to respond to the future requirements in financial industry. The ultimate goal is to help to improve the financial strength of banks, pension funds, insurance companies, other financial institutions and households in Europe.

The HPCFinance network has three interconnected areas:

• methodologies and modeling;
• quantitative risk management and derivative pricing (fixed, index-linked and variable annuities and ALM asset liability management, including counterparty risk management); and
• HPC engineering.

HPC Finance partner network consists of leading universities and companies, representing investment and insurance companies, banks, consultants, and high-performance computing solution providers: Citigroup, Barrie & Hibbert, Scottish Widows Investment Partnership, Techila Technologies, Tampere University of Technology, University of Manchester,… The full list of network partners and information of their projects in HPCFinance can be found on the HPCFinance web site.

If you are interested in developing your career and professional expertise at the fertile crossroads of Financial Engineering and High Performance Computing providing robust solutions to managing financial risks, you should not miss the opportunities available in HPCFinance. HPCFinance is seeking to recruit twelve Early Stage Researchers and two Experienced Researchers in the network under employment contracts with full social security coverage. More information about job opportunities in HPCFinance and how to apply for a position can be found at the HPCFinance web site at www.hpcfinance.eu.

Techila Technologies has been known as the provider of High Performance Computing (HPC) middleware solutions, which enable HPC on every desk. Techila’s middleware has enabled easy and secure acceleration of applications from Finance to Biosciences. Now, by enabling Techila on mobile, Techila Technologies has taken the next step, opening the door for HPC to every pocket.

On this video, we see the power of the Techila middleware on mobile handset. An application based on Monte Carlo methods uses the Techila middleware plug-in to connect securely to the infinite capacity of the cloud. The automatic distribution enabled by Techila gives the mobile application 138x acceleration with 200 Cloud CPU cores, shielding the user from all complexity.

The integration in this mobile demo is based on the APIs included in the Techila SDK. The Techila SDK is available free of charge from the Techila Extranet at www.techilatechnologies.com/extranet. Enabling cloud scalability in your application using Techila is free. You can include Techila API in your project free, and you can distribute your Techila-enabled application without license costs, with Techila you pay only when you compute.