Putting the Cloud in HPC

It has been an interesting week in terms of analyst commentary and coverage evaluating the advances and adoption of cloud within HPC environments.

Three different reports on cloud adoption crossed my desk in the last week or so, and I wanted to provide some context and thoughts on what they mean to Platform and our customers. I have also provided links to the material should you be interested in learning more (Note: full access to the reports is restricted to subscribers of the various market research firms).

IDC’s Top 10 HPC Predictions

• The IDC HPC team held an excellent webinar last week where they outlined their predictions for HPC in 2010. One of the key items on the predictions list is the adoption of cloud within HPC. The webinar references that most of the action is in private cloud environments, with HPC specific solutions emerging. This mirrors what we see in our customer base. It is interesting to see how some of the largest compute infrastructures used for research, design and analytics are embracing the notion of private cloud, to make their HPC environment more dynamic and elastic.

IDC Link on “Cloud Computing comes to HPC”

• Steve Conway from IDC wrote a quick summary of the activity he is seeing in the market. Front and center is the CERN cloud use case being built around Platform ISF and Platform ISF Adaptive Cluster, enabling CERN to evolve their existing HPC environment to a dynamic cloud environment. Another good indication that the market is starting to embrace the cloud and take advantage of these concepts in HPC environments.

451 Group User Deployment Report on CERN

• William Fellows of The 451 Group also just published a very detailed summary of the CERN use case that describes it as a “private cloud for scientists at scale.” His report shows some of the benefits that a large compute environment like CERN can achieve by evolving their HPC environment to the cloud. From our perspective, this has been a very exciting and interesting deployment since CERN is leading the industry with its advanced HPC cloud infrastructure, especially considering its scale of 10,000’s of servers.

The common theme across all these reports is the real adoption of cloud infrastructures and, more specifically, the use cases supporting private cloud within HPC environments. As these examples show, users can receive real benefit from a more dynamic and flexible HPC environment, enabling them to maximize their resources for their most demanding and business-critical research, design and analytical applications.