Virtuozzo, the leading alternative cloud platform, has collaborated with Rolos by Constructor group (formerly known as Schaffhausen Institute of Technology or SIT), to create and implement a cutting-edge research platform for scientists in academia and industry.



The team has developed a platform within Virtuozzo Cloud, the public cloud fuelled by the Virtuozzo Hybrid Infrastructure, providing high-performance Kubernetes clusters, S3 storage and flexible CPU/GPU virtualization through a simple user interface, and is fully integrated with Constructor group's HPC (High-Performance Computing) cluster.

Constructor group aims to combat global issues through science, education, and state-of-the-art technologies. The Rolos platform streamlines and speeds up the research cycle using AI-based computational modelling. Rolos offers its platform to research teams worldwide as a service for commercial and academic purposes.

This advancement is a significant boost for research teams that require diverse computing resources for multiple research projects and stages. In materials science, for instance, Rolos facilitates HPC to model new material properties; researchers can train machine learning models using neural networks running on virtualized GPUs to predict such properties without the cost of HPC.

"With Virtuozzo, we have built an advanced research collaboration platform with machine intelligence tightly integrated with high-performance virtualized infrastructure. Research teams can now get the tools and IT resources they need with a few clicks. Therefore, they can focus on research, not IT," Dobrovolskiy added.

The Rolos platform is available as a hosted solution running on Virtuozzo Hybrid Infrastructure in Constructor group's data centers. Additionally, Rolos offers an on-premises solution, enabling its research platform to operate on top of a private Virtuozzo cluster installed in a client's lab or data center. Research teams can easily combine on-premises and cloud in hybrid configurations using multiple virtualization technologies and public cloud providers with Virtuozzo's OpenStack API. Although the Rolos platform is "cloud-agnostic," the team believes that Virtuozzo-based clouds provide the most value in the majority of use cases.

"We are proud to partner with Rolos and contribute to their mission. This is a great example of Virtuozzo cloud technologies supporting an innovative software project through development and into production," said Alex Fine, Virtuozzo CEO. "Virtuozzo software was designed to make cloud simple, flexible, and affordable, and we're looking forward to helping the Rolos team bring its new platform to research teams worldwide."

Virtuozzo and Rolos have embarked on a groundbreaking collaboration designed to transform the landscape of scientific research. Virtuozzo, an industry leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure software, brings to the table its expertise in creating and managing virtual environments. By leveraging Virtuozzo's technology, researchers and scientists can harness the power of virtualization to optimize their computational resources, scale their workloads, and streamline their research processes.

Rolos, on the other hand, specializes in data management and analytics tailored for the unique needs of scientific research. Their platform provides robust capabilities for storing, managing, and analyzing large volumes of research data, enabling researchers to derive valuable insights and accelerate their scientific discoveries.

The integration of Virtuozzo's virtualization solutions with Rolos' data management and analytics platform equips researchers with a comprehensive toolkit to navigate the complexities of scientific research. By effectively virtualizing their computational workloads and leveraging advanced data management and analytics capabilities, scientists can enhance their productivity, speed up data processing, and collaborate more seamlessly within their research teams.

This partnership between Virtuozzo and Rolos has the potential to fuel innovation across a wide spectrum of scientific domains, ranging from genomics and drug discovery to climate modeling and materials science. By streamlining infrastructure management and data processing, the collaboration aims to empower researchers to focus on their core scientific pursuits while benefiting from a robust and efficient technological framework.

While the integration with Virtuozzo's infrastructure sounds promising, the reliance on cloud-based solutions raises concerns about data security and compliance, especially in sensitive research environments. The promise of "cloud-agnostic" capabilities is appealing, yet it often leads to vendor lock-in challenges. Researchers might find themselves entangled in a web of dependencies, limiting their operational flexibility.

Additionally, the claim that it allows teams to focus solely on research feels somewhat exaggerated, the complexities of managing hybrid environments can still divert attention from core scientific pursuits.