About the Client
NASA Ames Research Center is a renowned NASA field center based in Silicon Valley, California, that has been developing pioneering technology for NASA missions since 1939. The center is responsible for cutting-edge research in areas such as high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, and robotics, all of which are crucial to the success of NASA's missions.
One of the key divisions at NASA Ames Research Center is the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) Division, which provides essential supercomputing services for NASA's missions and projects. NAS plays a critical role in enabling NASA's mission-critical projects by providing high-performance computing resources for research and development, modeling and simulation, and data analysis.
Despite the state-of-the-art technology and resources available at NAS, the division faced numerous challenges in providing consistent and reliable HPC services to support NASA missions. These challenges included system issues, security threats, and the need for continual upgrades to keep up with the rapidly changing technology landscape. To overcome these challenges and maintain its reputation as a world-class HPC provider, NAS turned to Varada Consulting for support.
Solution and Outcomes
Varada Consulting supported and maintained HPC services for the NAS Division, including servers, disk subsystems, other storage devices, storage servers, networking, and related hardware, software, and infrastructure. Varada Consulting provided operational system administration duties, such as software installation, configuration management, monitoring, metrics gathering, and problem-solving. They also provided 24x7 automated monitoring of all equipment and services to ensure high levels of availability and functionality.
Varada Consulting addressed system issues quickly and promptly, returning systems to full service as soon as possible in the event of an unscheduled outage. They provided root cause analysis for system outages and shared lessons learned to improve standard operating procedures and future architectural designs to mitigate additional failures.
Varada Consulting supported the planning, implementation, integration, and acceptance of new systems and services or modifications of existing systems and services, as well as the retirement and de-installation of systems and services. They addressed user requests promptly and kept users up to date on the progress toward a solution, tracking their response to the user request through ticketing systems. Varada Consulting also provided general troubleshooting for system and low-level hardware and software-related issues and coordinated solutions to user problems with vendors if necessary.
Varada Consulting documented all system-related information for computing systems and services, including Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), the system design, best practices, website information, and frequently asked questions. They maintained these documents in a shared environment, providing support for system upgrades and configuration management.
Tools and Compliance
Varada Consulting utilized a variety of tools to support the HPC operations, including monitoring and alerting software, configuration management tools, and ticketing systems. They ensured compliance with FISMA/NIST and NASA IT security guidelines, maintaining and operating all systems and services according to these standards.
