Oracle Magazine, September/October 2018
ORACLE MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER OCTOBER 2018 44 ulations available to a wide range of users including institutions that didnt have the wherewithal to invest in supercomputers So two years ago the company started to look into how it could use the cloud to provide that back end processing power Another big potential advantage of the cloud was that it could support collaborative research allowing multiple researchers in different locations to work on the same model at the same time One big obstacle at the time the company had no experience with cloud computing To help make the leap to the cloud Interactive Scientific applied to join the Oracle Startup Cloud Accelerator Program which was just getting off the ground in the UK Run by Oracles research and development staff the worldwide program aims to help startups by providing technical and business mentoring coworking space state of the art technology free Oracle Cloud credits and access to Oracle customers partners and investors Interactive Scientific was one of just 5 companies selected from more than 100 that applied to join the first UK cohort of startups Tew says that Oracles support and expertise proved invaluable I had a crash course in cloud computing and most of the lessons Ive learned have been through talking to Oracle engineers he says They really primed us for the problems that we couldnt foresee at the outset How do you make something scalable in the cloud How do you slice up a problem in the correct way so that when you scale up it doesnt explode on you The challenge was particularly daunting because the company was trying to achieve something that had never been done We had to prove it was even possible to run the simulations in the cloud and stream them to your phone or another device Tew says It really wasnt a solved problem at all Oracles support helped the company meet the challenges one step at a time We didnt want to go from zero to autoscaling infrastructure immediately There are a bunch of steps in between from the initial prototype implementation to creating a scalable architecture says Tew Interactive Scientific found that running the simulations on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute bare metal instances provided the performance the company needs to support multiple users in real time We get the full power
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