High Performance Computing and Cloud Computing in the 21st Century

Traditionally, HPC has involved an on-premises infrastructure, investing in supercomputers or computer clusters. Over the last decade, cloud computing has grown in popularity for offering computer resources in the commercial sector regardless of their investment capabilities. Some characteristics like

scalability and containerization also have raised interest in academia. However security in the cloud concerns such as data confidentiality are still considered when deciding between cloud or on-premise HPC resources.

High Performance Computing (HPC) is a technology that uses clusters of powerful processors that work in parallel to process massive, multidimensional data sets and solve complex problems at extremely high speeds.

High Performance Computing (HPC) solves some of today’s most complex computing problems in real-time. HPC systems typically run at speeds more than one million times faster than the fastest commodity desktop, laptop or server systems.

Supercomputers, purpose-built computers that embody millions of processors or processor cores, have been vital in high-performance computing for decades. Unlike mainframes, supercomputers are much faster and can run billions of floating-point operations in one second.

Supercomputers are still with us; the fastest supercomputer is the US-based Frontier, with a processing speed of 1.206 exaflops, or quintillion floating point operations per second (flops).1 But today, more organizations are running HPC services on clusters of high-speed computer servers hosted on premises or in the cloud.

HPC workloads uncover new insights that advance human knowledge and create significant competitive advantages. For example, HPC sequences DNA and automates stock trading. It runs artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms and simulations—like those enabling self-driving automobiles—that analyze terabytes of data streaming from Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, radar and GPS systems in real-time to make split-second decisions.

As recently as a decade ago, the high cost of HPC, which involved owning or leasing a supercomputer or building and hosting an HPC cluster in an on-premises data center, put it out of reach for most organizations.

Today, HPC in the cloud—sometimes called HPC as a service or HPCaaS—offers a significantly faster, more scalable and more affordable way for companies to take advantage of HPC. HPCaaS typically includes access to HPC clusters and infrastructure hosted in a cloud service provider’s data center, network capabilities (such as AI and data analytics) and HPC expertise.