At Firmus, we’re paving the path for a sustainable future — we’re changing the world, decarbonising one customer at a time. We work with a team of like-minded individuals, who make sure we’re doing the right things, the right way. There are decades of experience on our team, as we aim to recruit people who excel at their field, but have a fresh outlook to the future — and a core member of our team who exemplifies this is Dr Peter Blain, Director of Product & AI.

As our technical lead and subject matter expert in AI, DevOps, Machine Learning & Supercomputing, Dr Peter Blain’s experience stems from his PhD in Artificial Intelligence & Computer Systems Engineering, and his work as a Former Systems Architect at the Australian Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS). Besides deep experience with Australia’s research HPC clusters, he has also developed systems and code at commercial (Biteable), research (IMOS & TPAC), and financial institutions (NAB, Westpac, HSBC, Bank of Tokyo – Mitsubishi).

Currently, at Firmus, we’re seeing exponential growth and change — Peter’s role is to keep track of it all, ensuring teams are supported with what they need in their respective spaces. 

When asked about a day in his life, Peter gives us a quick breakdown, “My day starts with a review of the kanban boards, which we use to manage our projects. The most important part of my day is making sure that our Supercloud project is on track and rolling out, which involves working with internal teams and third-party vendors. I’m always researching new product features and developments in the HPC cloud and ML sectors – and I typically work closely with Jonny, our Sales Director. I also manage the software and devops teams for the energy services part of our business.”

Supercloud is a core service offered by Firmus — a computational cloud to support intense workloads. With world-leading energy efficiency and PUE, powered by near zero-emission renewable energy, Firmus Supercloud provides leading GPU accelerated compute and network performance. 

“The most advantageous thing about migrating to Supercloud is that you can run expensive and energy-intensive GPU workloads at around half the price and with almost zero environmental impact. If you run these same types of workloads on other cloud providers you’ll pay more and end up with a nasty carbon footprint. Our technology allows companies to start decarbonising their workloads, no matter how intense.” 

The Supercloud Beta program will be released first, followed by commercial access. If you’re a company looking for intense GPU usage, you would massively benefit from being a part of the program — especially if it’s related to machine learning workloads. Firmus also benefits from partnerships with both, NVIDIA and Canonical. NVIDIA supplies our GPUs, while Canonical is helping us build a world-class public cloud that’s accessible to all.

“Everything is new and exciting here. It’s incredible how we’ve harnessed renewable energy to build a large scale carbon-free cloud infrastructure that could change the world of compute.”