High-Performance Computing (HPC) brings a powerful set of tools to a broad range of industries, helping to drive innovation and boost revenue in finance, genomics, oil and gas extraction, and other fields. For many smaller organizations, on-premises HPC infrastructure is too expensive to procure and maintain. They have been forced to make do with renting time on others’ supercomputers, outsourcing design and engineering tasks, or running their applications on whatever computing hardware they can afford. Even within larger organizations that can afford to host their own HPC infrastructure, engineers and researchers must compete for scarce computing resources. But cloud-based HPC solutions are putting vast computational capabilities within reach of more and more organizations—and offering greater flexibility as well.
Using cloud-based HPC lets organizations get started quickly and start to realize benefits almost immediately. Many see faster innovation thanks to shorter turnaround times and improved flexibility, and collaboration is greatly enhanced between teams that might not be able to work together otherwise due to geographical or other logistical considerations. Cost optimization is also a key factor when considering cloud-based HPC—it is much simpler to predict and manage budget and resource use in the cloud.
Many startups and independent researchers who had not even considered buying and setting up their own HPC infrastructure because of perceived up-front costs are finding that it’s now easier than ever—and much less expensive—to dive into cloud-based HPC. The ability to configure massive parallel computing clusters on-demand in the cloud changes the rules—any team with a need for compute resources to solve a problem can start working on it in hours or days. As more organizations adopt cloud-based HPC, more applications, ISVs, and systems integrators are creating better and better solutions for a wider range of users.
BARRIERS TO ENTRY ARE ERODING QUICKLY
Many organizations, especially smaller ones, are held back by outdated beliefs regarding the cost and effort required to get started with HPC applications. Most of these are true enough for large on-premises HPC setups but are no longer true for nimble cloud-based HPC solutions. As cloud-based HPC solutions have matured rapidly, they have become much easier to start using. Even small teams with limited resources are finding that they can test whether HPC can help them innovate faster, or get products to market faster, without taking huge risks with their budgets.
TRANSITIONING AND ONBOARDING
Until recently, organizations that switched from on-premises HPC to cloud-based solutions had to deal with transition issues like license management, or the need to revisit their systems to manage the use of elastic compute resources.
As cloud-based HPC has matured, support ecosystems have developed around it to help make the transition simpler and less expensive. Of course, smaller organizations new to HPC won’t have to deal with these issues and can take advantage of the support structures to jump-start their HPC efforts with cloud-born or cloud-native HPC applications.
Today, there are many options to help ease organizations through onboarding to first-time HPC use or transition from traditional on-premises HPC to the cloud. While internal change management is still up to the organization, most of the heavy lifting involved in getting started can be handled by the cloud provider or a third-party system integrator Transitioning from on-premises HPC solutions is relatively simple now. Many on-premises applications are adding cloud-friendly licensing models, and new cloud-oriented ISVs are developing cloud-first applications to challenge industry leaders. In most cases, the cost of transitioning and decommissioning old hardware is more than offset by
gains in productivity, innovation, and accelerated time-to-market.
And it’s easier than ever to skip past traditional solutions and get started directly in the cloud. Small organizations can explore options with minimal investment and can get assistance from third-party vendors like Ronin, who develop portals that help small teams start doing their research without having to dive into the details of setting up HPC clusters.
NEEDS ANALYSIS
Understanding needs is one of the oldest business problems, but it’s also fairly straightforward once the initial trial-and-error period has led to solid results. Any organization considering HPC applications as part of their research or engineering programs needs to ask two big questions:
- What are our infrastructure requirements? For on-premises HPC, infrastructure size is often dictated by budget, but the pricing and flexibility of cloud-based HPC mean that a precise awareness of specific needs will be rewarded with reduced costs and less downtime for researchers.
- How much capacity will we need over time? Correctly predicting need is a major driver of ROI in HPC, whether on-premises or in the cloud. Big capital expenditure items, like on-premises HPC infrastructure, have a 3-5-year procurement cycle. Organizations of all sizes usually struggle with predicting the capacity needed for the next 3-5 years. Buying based on an inflated expectation of growth leads to expensive, unutilized capacity. Pessimistic forecasts lead to oversubscribed resources and lower productivity. This can be especially challenging for smaller organizations or those new to HPC. Cloud-based HPC eliminates the need for long term forecasting, thanks to near-instant access to any required capacity and the latest technologies.
HPC Solutions for Tyrone Systems
Tyrone has a long history in the HPC market and is the fastest-growing major HPC solutions provider, providing solutions to some of the largest end-users in ASEAN. This experience has placed us in a strong position to help end-users accomplish their workloads in an efficient environment. We offer exceptional price-performance, security, and control for today’s most demanding high-performance computing (HPC) workloads.
Explore the unlimited possibilities of HPC. Talk to our expert today at info@tyronesystems.com
