Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library

Overview

RRPFI has been a long-term Dynascale private cloud customer. In mid-2024, they approached Dynascale with a need for GPU hardware to support an Artificial Intelligence (AI) project. They provided specifications for the GPU model requirements, hoping these could be added to their existing private cloud nodes.

However, their current generation of enterprise servers could not support the new GPU models due to hardware limitations. Leveraging Dynascale’s lifecycle upgrade guarantee, it was decided to build a new private cloud infrastructure on the latest generation servers capable of accommodating the required GPUs.

RRPFI selected Shakudo’s solution as the platform for their AI project, running in their private cloud using local models to ensure data sovereignty. These models handled both text and image data for generative AI purposes, delivered through web-integrated agents.

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About Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library

The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute (RRPFI) is the sole nonprofit organization created by President Reagan charged with advancing his legacy and principles – individual liberty, economic opportunity, freedom and democracy, peace through strength, and national pride.

A globally recognized nonpartisan organization based in Simi Valley, CA, with a leading policy institute in Washington, DC, RRPFI delivers:

• Impactful public affairs programming.
• Policy convenings and projects of national and international significance.
• Distinctive educational initiatives shaping the perspectives of middle, high school, and college students.

In addition, RRPFI sustains the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, the largest and most visited presidential library. A leading cultural institution, RRPFI houses a remarkable 125,000 square foot museum with unique historical pieces that tell the story of Ronald Reagan’s life, presidency, and enduring impact, and houses world-class special exhibitions, such as “Vatican Splendors,” “Titanic,” and “Auschwitz. Not long ago. Not far away.”

With views all the way to the Pacific Ocean and an hour from Los Angeles International Airport, RRPFI’s Simi Valley campus sits on 400 acres atop a hill, serves as the final resting place of America’s 40th President and former First Lady Nancy Reagan, displays a chunk of the Berlin Wall, and houses (among other remarkable displayed hardware) the plane President Reagan flew as Air Force One to 26 countries. Onsite are the:

• Reagan Center for Public Affairs
• Presidential Learning Center
• Air Force One Pavilion
• Reagan Leadership Center

Key Requirements for the Solution

• Latest generation servers that can support the NVidia L4, L40, or L40S GPU models.
• Low latency network switching.
• A hypervisor with vGPU support.
• Enterprise-level storage network with low latency and improved IO capabilities.
• Enterprise-level firewall and VPN solution.
• 24/7 Network and Cloud engineering support with a comprehensive SLA.
• Migration with minimal workload interruption.
• Integration with customer security requirements.

The Dynascale Solution

A project plan that included designing, building, testing, and workload migration was created in cooperation with RRPFI. Dynascale first obtained detailed GPU requirements from the AI software solution vendor chosen by RRPFI for the project to ensure the private cloud server upgrades would support the indicated NVidia GPUs.

Then the private cloud server build could be customized with the selected GPUs to ensure adequate power and heat ventilation. At this point, the private cloud build could proceed using our standardized build design and prepare for a seamless migration from the existing to the new environment using Veeam.

VMware was selected as the private cloud hypervisor since it has solid cross-vendor support and has a solution for leveraging the NVidia virtual GPU (vGPU) capabilities. vGPU allows multiple Virtual Machines (or containers) to share the GPU resources.

All of the remaining solution requirements for low latency switching, performant storage network, enterprise firewall/VPN, 24/7 support, and customer security requirements were easily satisfied by our latest standard product offerings.

Case Conclusion

The project to design, build, test, and migrate was completed on-time and on-scope despite some scheduling challenges by allowing for task time buffers which rolled up to the milestone level to ensure dependent milestones completed on schedule.

Dynascale and RRPFI made a concerted effort to ensure the correct resources were available throughout the engagement. This meant not only engineering resources but management in case an unplanned change request was needed to stay on track.

The delivered NVidia GPU-powered private cloud solution met the requirements from RRPFI, and the dependent AI project successfully provided the value intended for both the text and image use cases.

Dynascale has continued to provide infrastructure and network engineering for the RRPFI private cloud, VPN, and office location networks successfully through a cost-efficient professional services add-on.

“ Our organization needed a scalable, reliable, and secure platform to run our mission critical systems and customer facing websites. Dynascale has delivered in each of those areas and is considered as our most trusted technology partner and an extension of our internal technology team. Dynascale has given us the confidence we need to thrive and develop new initiatives that rely heavily on security and scalability. “

{{Mark Fitzpatrick}}