Good afternoon, everybody. I'm with TransTech. First of all, let me give you a quick overview
of who TransTech is. It's a small, medium-sized company, about 150 employees in the equally
small town of Tübingen, a small university town south of Stuttgart. Last year we celebrated
our 30th anniversary and it's, I think, fair to say that TransTech was quite born into
the HPC market because we started as a reseller of digital equipment products. DEC workstations,
Sun workstations came later, RS6000 workstations, and from the very beginning we positioned
ourselves within the scientific computing market. So we started selling workstations
to institutes and researchers and it was just a natural evolution sort of to go on selling
HPC clusters when the first clusters were beginning to get deployed in Germany. In fact,
TransTech was one of the very first German providers of HPC cluster solutions. Got a
couple of new partnerships during the last year. We announced the Crazy X1 partnership
last year and this year, beginning of this year, we are also strategically partnering
with IBM, focusing within the realm of HPC as well. Well, BrightNew is the partnership
with BrightComputing. BrightComputing, well, as many of you might know, the manufacturer
of, well, in my opinion, the really ease of use management and deployment solution for
HPC systems is now also part of our portfolio. And up to now we've got around 400 HPC cluster
installations Europe-wide. As you can see here, TransTech is a German company with some subsidiaries
all along Europe, got subsidiary in UK, France, Switzerland, Austria and the Netherlands as well.
Our two strategic customers, customer markets are the academic world on the one hand side,
that's where we were grown into, so to speak. And the other strategic market for us are industrial
customers, engineering companies, life science companies, well, in fact, Tubing is not far from
Stuttgart, Stuttgart is, well, one of the main locations of the engineering companies,
automotive companies, those two markets, academic and industrial, are strategic, customer-based.
So, what is TransTech to say about HPC? We're not a chip designer, we're not
original manufacturer of hardware, we don't have a hardware engineering or chip design
department. We see ourselves as a focal point by a smart collection of partners,
considering a focal point of technology, leaders that are in the HPC world and a focal point to
the customer that gives customers access to this smart choice of partner network. And as I will
come back later to, together with a very, very broad set of services that are especially,
in at least to my opinion, interesting to customers that do not have and they are lacking
this kind of HPC know how that is necessary to run an HPC system.
What do customers want? Customers want an ease of management, an ease of use,
an HPC cluster is a complex beast and we try to take pains to hide this complexity under the hood
and provide the customer with an easy interface to their system because eventually what the customer
wants to do is not managing the system but is running the productive application for solving
their problems. Customers want high productivity and efficient use of their systems, a high
utilization rate. They want to be prepared for Windows HPC and when they normally prefer
as now Linux, want a scalable, stable and an easy to use HPC storage solution and well engineered
and stable GPU computing solutions as well. I think we heard a couple of talks about GPU
computing already today. So what does it mean? For example, every cluster that is based on
Intel CPUs obviously will be into a cluster already certified which gives the customer
a third-party kind of quality certificate that the cluster, that the system runs as it's supposed
to be and as you know ICR certificate means if you get this certificate and the cluster is proven to
run a various set of productive and commercial applications and customers can be assured that
the customer will be a turnkey solution up and running as a customer expects it to be. As I said
quite new, we are as of four weeks ago officially reselling also Bright, cluster manager as part
of our portfolio because well we chose Bright for the real ease of cluster management. Obviously
Bright is at least in our opinion the solution for that. Hiding all the complexity of a cluster
means giving as I said customers the ease of access to the computing power of a cluster. So
Bright is in our opinion the ideal partner for providing a cluster management solution.
Adaptive computing and other partner of ours for
dynamical deployment for example of clusters when it comes to, well as everybody is talking
about right now, cloud computing, dynamical deployment, heterogeneous cluster nodes that
have to be installed in no time and then packed up again. We are partnering with
Pinesis for an ease of use as it comes to HPC storage and well last but not least we've got a
pretty large engineering department within our company that takes pains to produce well
engineered and stably running GPU computing solutions as well for customers that are able
to make use of Tesla accelerated and CUDA accelerated codes. So what else does Transcic
offer to customers? As I said especially private companies smaller companies that are lacking
the HPC know-how of or for example the HPC infrastructure to run and manage an HPC system
they get during the whole life cycle of a cluster from the procurement from the purchasing
so to speak to the pre-sales phase where the customers are unsure whether this or that
technology would be most advantageous to the application. We do benchmarks for the customers
and the customer first needs to do some evaluation tests if the application really performs as is
scalable for example as it's expected as they expect them to be. We do not only sell the system
as is like as a piece of hardware we pre-deploy it pre-installed it integrates the system into
the customer's environment and even after after deployment and after the on on-site assembly
we take care of integrating optionally all say the services from the service point of view all the
all the the system into the customer's environment which could for example mean
do the directory service integration user management integration and so we train the
customers give workshops and do after sales consulting to the admin staff if available as
well. We do not stop there we do everything from well maintaining the cluster giving support
obviously do managed services all around the HPC system we even run the system for the
for the customers if customers lack admin staff for example so we do that for them as well and
well then we take the customer into the next purchasing phase when the life cycle of the
cluster ends so to speak. Well Transig being a small company is of course depending on strong
partners we got the strong partners as I said we see ourselves as a focal point to the customers
giving customers the access access in in one in one location so to speak to the to the whole world of
technology leaders that are out there from from well Intel to Microsoft IBM Nvidia bright computing
create your logic we make this HPC world available to the customers well and this is pretty much it
thank you. Thank you very much Dr. Tenet first question from Gerhard Vellain.
Thanks a lot Dr. Tenet for your talk honestly speaking I cannot see what makes you different
from other companies you are selling the same software products I can get an Intel cluster
ready cluster from everyone I can add bright solutions so I cannot see what makes your
difference are you going to compete on price in this business? Well of course you can you can buy
say for example say bright from bright directly no problem you can also buy say well
mobile from adaptive computing directly and so you can go on to on a shopping spree
and take all your components of choice and buy them with the original manufacturer of course
that's what you can do but what you can also do as a customer is you can go just to one place
and have the whole set of technology leaders there then again someone has to do the installation
someone has to do the consulting someone has to to do the correct sizing to do the benchmarking
that's done by us as well so someone has to to provide services to the customer managing it
administrating it giving them off the sets of policy someone has to do it and this is us.
Mr. Sherman your turn. Thank you for the presentation so my question is related to that
so assume for a second I'm a user I'm at a university and I start small my HPC demands
develop and and then they grow and suddenly I realize I want to simulate a whole human brain
and so the question is what defines the threshold when you would say I'm not qualifying for an SM
SME or a university business anymore so is there any change in quality when the demands grow where
you would say we don't provide that service? Well obviously there is a natural limit for a
company like Transect to provide solutions when they come to to the size of the first top 10 of
the top 500 list for example we're not big but we are well smart flexible so there is not it's not
to me it's not a matter of well it's not a quality that changes it's a quantity and
well I would say one of the key factors that really restricts us when it comes to
well modeling a human brain obviously needs very a very large cluster I think so is its sheer size
so we're not we're not IBM and we're not Intel so we're not able to provide say a 100 million dollar
class so that's not what we can do what we can do is provide to those customers that are in need
of this the flexibility and and well make them make to them accessible the whole the whole
world of technology that they really need for for doing their their things but it's not it's a
it's a matter of size it's not a matter of quality I don't think that quality really changes well
it's it's quantitative things I would say