HPC Cloud
What is HPC Cloud?
HPC cloud is high performance computing that has been virtualized to the cloud. Like bare metal computing, it is capable of handling massive volumes of data at high speeds using multiple virtualized devices and storage to solve highly complex problems.
Why is HPC cloud important?
Like its physical counterpart, HPC in the cloud helps organizations and enterprises solve complex problems at greater velocity and less cost. However, by pushing HPC to the cloud, processes for several industries, including business, science, and engineering, become even faster, helping accelerate testing and new product development without the need for physical testing and infrastructure.
What are the challenges of HPC cloud?
Many of the obstacles for cloud-based solutions extend to HPC cloud, including cost, security, and perceived performance. Cloud performance still requires significant technology investment in processors, storage, and network capabilities; without that infrastructure in place, organizations can’t expect peak efficiency. Regulatory and governmental guidelines can also be challenging, requiring any HPC cloud solution to satisfy strict security standards.
Why do businesses run HPC workloads in the cloud?
HPC cloud can rapidly accelerate innovation and reduce the need for, or reliance on, on-premises HPC alone, enabling automation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning capabilities. Companies can create solutions and products faster and get to market faster, bolstering their competitive advantage. In the cloud, HPC can be separated into specific workloads according to demand or specific team requirements. HPC cloud is also more flexible, capable of scaling up or down to mitigate wasted resources. Its availability as a third-party service (aaS) helps remove many of the long-term cost demands of traditional HPC, namely up-front architecture and provisioning. The as-a-service model—or consumption-based model—ensures companies only pay for the compute resources they use. The shift to a provided, managed solution makes HPC and HPC cloud resources more available to widespread users, who otherwise may not have access to them.
What are HPC solutions in the cloud?
Companies use HPC cloud solutions for a variety of applications, spanning analytics, information access, scientific research, and beyond.
For instance, manufacturers will use computer-aided engineering to develop advanced prototypes without the need for extensive physical resources like hands-on laboratories and research, with experimentation and simulation occurring in the cloud.
Healthcare researchers can use HPC to aggregate patient medical information and data to advance disease research, medical trials, and drug development. HPC cloud can even accelerate genome processing and sequencing.
HPC is an integral part of financial services, where risk analysis and fraud detection require fast and exhaustive processing of multiple data sources to correctly inform investment profitability and forecasting as well as using historical data analysis to identify outlier purchase behavior in near-real-time.
The democratization of HPC also extends to film, media, and gaming development, where workloads can aid graphics rendering, image analysis, transcoding, and encoding.
HPE and HPC cloud
HPE offers a broad portfolio of HPC and HPC cloud offerings, including the high-performance hardware, software, and storage that makes HPC possible, and the expertise and managed services to accelerate transformation.
Companies can choose from HPE Cray Exascale Supercomputers or HPE Apollo Systems, designed to handle modern demands for converged modeling, simulation, and AI. For storage, there is HPE Compute HPC storage that can accommodate unique and traditional all-flash file storage that’s still cost-effective and scalable.
Companies in need of a complete, end-to-end solution can opt for HPE GreenLake for HPC, a scalable managed solution that makes it easier for enterprises of any size to get the benefits of HPC without the deployment challenges. HPE GreenLake for HPC runs on premises—at a company’s edge, in a colocation, or in their data center—so you benefit from the security and control that an on-premises infrastructure provides. And with consumption-based billing, companies can rest easy knowing they aren’t paying for unused resources while retaining the flexibility to pursue new opportunities as they arise.