Introducing Parallel Works Mission Engineering

Parallel Works systems and solutions engineers have joined forces to create Parallel Works' new Mission Engineering (ME) team. Focused on customer success, PW mission engineers act as an extension of your own team, providing expert support for your high performance computing and AI workloads.

Parallel Works' ACTIVATE control plane federates on-premises clusters, hyperscaler clouds, and neocloud-hosted dedicated GPU capacity into one governed console. Administrators manage their organization's users, groups, and budgets, while integrations with hyperscaler clouds enable end-users to shape and provision private HPC clusters. The platform's workflow orchestration framework allows practitioners to build, run, and share reproducible computational workflows.

Flexibility and complexity often go hand in hand. Since our founding in 2015, we have learned that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. PW mission engineers have extensive industry experience building and managing HPC infrastructure, environments, software, and workflows. The team plays an active role throughout the entire customer lifecycle; evaluating project requirements in pre-sales, designing tailored solutions, conducting customized training sessions, and supporting production environments. This approach accelerates time to productivity, and keeps system users focused on the mission at hand.

Mission Engineering: Why now?

The scientific computing landscape is evolving. New, AI driven technologies are being adopted at unprecedented speed while departing individuals take decades of institutional knowledge with them. The collective effect of these processes can result in knowledge and skill gaps along with technical debt. Parallel Works mission engineers help to fill these gaps, load balancing the team and keeping contributors focused on accomplishing project goals.

Furthermore, the AI boom is driving the perception that code has become a low-cost commodity. In order to stand out, today's engineers must excel in communication and execution. PW mission engineers work directly with your team to identify technical and financial requirements, design bespoke solutions, and provide personal support from beginning to end. No endless chatbot support loops or ticket escalation hoops to jump through.

A Growing History of Mission Success

If you're wondering what Parallel Works' Mission Engineering team can do for your team, you need only look at our previous success stories.

Since the 2023 Atlantic hurricane season, Parallel Works has supported a Federal weather research team demonstrating that a hurricane forecast ensemble can run in real time on commercial cloud. Leveraging compute resources provided by hyperscale cloud providers and Parallel Works' ACTIVATE control plane, researchers have direct access to pre-configured HPC cluster environments to conduct their experiments. The Mission Engineering team works closely with the science team, assisting with cluster configuration, daily operations, and system maintenance. This keeps the science team focused on forecast results instead of cloud administration. In the first season, 99.96 percent of ensemble member forecasts in August and September completed successfully. The work Parallel Works and GDIT carried out to move weather forecasting workloads from on-premises systems to the cloud received HPCwire's 2025 Editors' Choice Award for Best Use of HPC in the Cloud.

For a major automotive manufacturer, the Mission Engineering team built an ACTIVATE workflow for 3DCS. Engineers use this tolerance analysis software to predict how small variations in individual parts add up across a vehicle assembly. On engineers' laptops these simulations took several weeks, and some could not run at all because the models needed more memory than a laptop has. An engineer now opens a form on the platform, selects a model from cloud storage, chooses the analysis, and launches it, with no code or command line. ACTIVATE splits the simulations across workers on an elastic cloud cluster that scales up for the job and back down when it finishes, and the results land in the engineer's storage bucket. Runs that took weeks now finish in hours.

Although demand for GPUs for AI and simulation workloads is rising, access to GPUs can be a challenge, thus prompting an industry-wide need for quick, flexible, and secure access to specialized GPU providers. A September post describes how Parallel Works' mission engineers brought a shared research environment online on a dedicated CoreWeave GPU reservation.

Since the company's founding in 2015, Parallel Works has collaborated with researchers in several scientific fields, initially with Department of Energy Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) funding. Parallel Works ME team members have collaborated with researchers in a wide variety of fields to address real-world research needs. Key achievements in this arena include winning the 2022 Excellence in Technology Transfer FLC National Award for commercializing a machine learning genetic algorithm (ML-GA) developed at Argonne National Laboratory (Argonne National Laboratory, 2022; Owoyele et al., 2021) and supporting an open science, participatory research project that used machine learning to guide river sediment sampling for developing a better understanding of river ecosystems (Gary et al., 2024; Malhotra et al., 2025).

What's Your Mission?

The success of Parallel Works' mission engineers, along with other industry trends, has helped reevaluate our sales approach to move away from per-user seat licensing and toward a services-first model. The ACTIVATE platform becomes less of a product and more of a compute empowerment tool that allows practitioners to mutually collaborate, support and share while also providing access to a wide range of compute and AI resources within organization-managed guardrails, including cost and security controls.

To discuss what a mission engineering team would look like for your program, contact:

• Matthew Shaxted, CEO, shaxted@parallelworks.com
• Phyllis Rhodes, Director of Sales, prhodes@parallelworks.com
• Matt Long, Director of Mission Engineering, mlong@parallelworks.com

References

Argonne National Laboratory (2022). Argonne and Parallel Works win highest honor from Federal Laboratory Consortium for excellence in technology transfer. April 27, 2022. newswise.com/doescience/argonne-and-parallel-works-win-highest-honor-from-federal-laboratory-consortium-for-excellence-in-technology-transfer

Gary, S. F., Scheibe, T. D., Rexer, E. L., Vidal Torreira, A., Garayburu-Caruso, V. A., Goldman, A. E., and Stegen, J. C. (2024). Prediction of distributed river sediment respiration rates using community-generated data and machine learning. Journal of Geophysical Research: Machine Learning and Computation, 1(3), e2024JH000199. doi.org/10.1029/2024JH000199

Malhotra, A., et al. (2025). Harnessing artificial intelligence to automate environmental predictions. bioRxiv preprint. doi.org/10.1101/2025.11.06.684583

Owoyele, O., Pal, P., Vidal Torreira, A., Probst, D., Shaxted, M., Wilde, M., and Senecal, P. K. (2021). Application of an automated machine learning-genetic algorithm (AutoML-GA) coupled with computational fluid dynamics simulations for rapid engine design optimization. arXiv:2101.02653. arxiv.org/abs/2101.02653