High Performance Computing

High Performance Computing (HPC) can solve many of the largest problems businesses face.  Problems that are too large to run on a single system.  Problems taking weeks or months to solve when the business needs answers in hours or minutes. This requires clusters of powerful computers working together. Work is distributed across these compute resources to deliver results at speed.

Organisations use HPC because they have such problems. Those needing amounts of computation to get to a result which is unachievable in other ways.  Maybe due to the ever-increasing volumes of data used by the business? Businesses tend to use HPC to either make money, save money or both.  e.g. using it to bring new products to market while better managing risk.

Traditionally, HPC systems were built on-premises.  Cloud computing allows on-premises HPC to be augmented with cloud resources. Businesses get greater flexibility and scalability in a more cost-effective way.

Imagine a situation where you run workloads with “spikes” of activity. This might exceed the compute capacity available on-premises.  Do you buy more hardware and accept the fact that for most of the time it's unused? 

Maybe you no longer want to be in the business of running datacentres and owning your own hardware?  It could be your datacentres are old, or the lease on them is expiring. Do you want to invest to upgrade them to keep up with growing business demands?

HPC systems need skilled staff to build, run and maintain them. Are you are struggling to recruit, reward and retain the people you need? Do you have duplicated HPC resources across many teams? Maybe you want to offload these staffing and skills problems to third party provider?

For all these scenarios, consuming HPC from the cloud makes clear business sense. Cloud delivers agility and efficiency. Using cloud together with on-premises HPC plays to the strengths of both. This is why more and more companies are using clouds to deliver all or part of their HPC capability.

John Easton

Distinguished Engineer – IBM Cloud HPC

JKJ@uk.ibm.com

To learn more about IBM Cloud HPC, please visit: https://www.ibm.com/high-performance-computing