Achieving Optimal Price/Performance for Your HPC Workload

High Performance Computing (HPC) drives the frontier of science, finance, engineering, education, chemistry, genomics, modeling, simulation and a host of other compute-intensive industry verticals. The traditional way of running HPC on-premises involves long procurement cycles, high up-front capital investment and, increasingly often, mid-cycle technology refreshes.

The flexibility and heterogeneity of HPC cloud services provide a welcome contrast to the constraints of onpremises HPC. Every HPC configuration is potentially accessible to any given workload in a well-resourced cloud HPC deployment, with vast scalability to spin up as much compute as that workload demands in any given moment.

In 2011, 13% of all sites running HPC leveraged public cloud HPC services. In 2018, the amount rose to 74%. As HPC in the cloud expands into more and more industries and use cases, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is broadening its footprint too. AWS is the primary cloud provider for 58% of the surveyed HPC user organizations running HPC workloads in the cloud, according to Hyperion Research.