Enterprises and research institutions alike embrace high performance computing (HPC) to conquer their most complex data-driven challenges. While many maintain on-premise HPC infrastructure to handle mission-critical workloads, adoption of HPC in the cloud is on the rise. Today’s solutions prove their mettle in delivering the scale, flexibility, performance, and cost-efficiency organizations need.
The cloud provides a path to HPC as a Service (HPCaaS), which offers several benefits to organizations just starting their journey to HPC. First, it provides a turnkey way to access the power of HPC as an alternative to, or augmentation of, capital expenditure for on-premise hardware and software. Secondly, HPCaaS plans are flexible. Customers can choose a pay-as-you-go plan allowing them access to the computing power needed by their workloads today, with the ability to increase capacity on demand.
A third benefit is an access to the latest HPC technologies. The world’s largest cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure using HC-series virtual machines (VMs) invest in the latest hardware and software underlying their HPCaaS solutions.
Microsoft’s proven Azure-based HPC solutions already support industries like manufacturing, energy, aerospace, and financial services. However, Microsoft Azure’s latest HC-series virtual machines (VMs) offer advanced HPC capability for especially-demanding workloads like computational chemistry, or finite element analysis. With the aid of Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, the HC-series VMs represent a scalable, performant, and cost-effective public cloud solution hosted on Azure.
A smaller, specialized cloud service provider — Advania – also recognizes the growing need for HPCaaS and has honed their business model to offer this capability to their clients. Advania is the first cloud service provider to offer HPCaaS instances based on the 2nd Generation Intel® Xeon® Platinum 9200 processor. The company also uses Intel® Omni-Path Architecture, offering customers a proven, performant solution to speed demanding workloads. Advania’s HPCaaS solutions also enable end-to-end data encryption and offer users the ability to manage and configure their isolated cluster down to the “bare metal” level.
HPCaaS supplements on-premise infrastructure
Today many research institutions and enterprises embrace in-house HPC solutions optimized for ideal performance for their mission-critical workloads. This approach offers the most cost-effective long-term approach to HPC since the initial infrastructure investment amortizes over time. However, an on-premise solution does require maintenance, and component upgrades may benefit the system as the organization’s HPC needs grow. For this reason, HPC users increasingly tap the benefits of HPCaaS to supplement their on-premise cluster.
This “hybrid” HPC approach offers several benefits like the ability to “sandbox” an HPC test environment in the cloud while retaining the on-premise cluster’s focus on the most critical aspects of their business or research. HPCaaS also offers the elasticity to supplement their existing HPC solutions. For example, if an organization’s on-premise cluster faces a bottleneck when manipulating a vast data set, HPC in the cloud can work around the constraint by enabling an immediately-scalable solution.
While use cases for on-premise or cloud-based HPC systems vary, Intel’s technologies underly both on-premise and cloud-based clusters. With the support of 2nd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors, Intel® Optane™ DC Persistent Memory, and other technological advances, organizations can trust the Intel architecture to accelerate their most demanding workloads.
HPCaaS in action
Industries like aerospace, energy, financial services, and manufacturing already lean on HPCaaS to grow their business and accelerate product and service development. To learn more about the ways HPC and HPCaaS can help advance your organization’s mission too, please visit Intel.com/hpc.
For more complete information about performance and benchmark results, visit www.intel.com/benchmarks.
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