A misconception held by many business and IT leaders is that all HPC systems are supercomputer-based. In fact, while supercomputers produced by firms such as Atos, IBM, HPE/Cray and Fujitsu lie at the heart of numerous specialized HPC systems, a more widely used approach is integrating multiple small computers into an interconnected cluster to provide HPC capabilities. Under such an arrangement, each computer within the cluster serves as a node. Each node is typically equipped with multiple processors, called compute cores, that handle computation tasks. The processors, graphical processing units (GPU) and memory resources within each node are interconnected to create an HPC system.
Since the cost of obtaining and operating a supercomputer and its custom software can easily run into the millions of dollars, the technology remains far beyond the financial reach of most enterprises. Cluster-type HPCs, using relatively inexpensive interconnected computers running off-the-shelf software, are generally more affordable to deploy and operate. Still, even a modestly sized cluster-based HPC can represent a significant investment for most enterprises, particularly those with only limited HPC needs.
This situation is now changing. Enterprises looking to gain HPC access without breaking their IT budgets now have the option of turning to public cloud services, such as Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and IBM Cloud.
"These services enable businesses to have access to HPC capabilities to serve their business needs without investing heavily in the hardware infrastructure of an HPC cluster," says Maksym Pavlov, .NET technical lead at Ciklum, a digital services and software engineering company. "The emergence of the cloud has sort of leveled the playing field to a certain extent between small companies and big companies," adds David Turek, IBM's vice president of exascale computing.
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