How many of you are tuned into the ongoing 2023 Grand Prix? This motorsport spectacle in Bahrain has attracted millions of viewers from different countries as they witness their favorite drivers race against time. As much as it is fun to watch the race cars engage in a thrill ride, have you wondered what goes on behind the making of such spectacular race? The answer is: High Performance Computing (HPC). F1 is not just a competition in racing, but also in engineering. Advanced fluid dynamics analysis improves everything in car design starting from wind tunnel simulations to testing tracks using the power of HPC.

Now the concept of HPC is not something new. It has been in existence since the 1960’s. However, it was strictly confined to supercomputers and scientific research. Today, this technology has proliferated across several industries including animation, retail, defense and navigation to name a few.

Let’s explore the magnificent world of HPC in greater detail.

Decoding HPC: What is HPC and How Does it Work?

HPC employs technology that uses clusters of servers and processors to churn out huge volumes of multi-dimensional datasets and solve very complex computational problems. Most HPC systems that you see today have three main components:

• Compute
• Network
• Storage

Usually, HPC consists of hundreds or thousands of servers that form a cluster. Each server is called a node. In each cluster, the nodes use high-performing multi-core CPUs and Graphical Processing Units (GPU) to perform highly complex computational operations.

HPC can support two kinds of workloads - parallel and tightly coupled.

Parallel workloads: Computational problems are broken down into small, independent tasks. These tasks run parallelly at a super-high speed. Molecular modeling, logistics and risks simulations are examples of parallel workloads.

Tightly coupled workloads: The workloads are divided into small tasks which are distributed across different nodes in the cluster. Weather forecast modeling, traffic management and geospatial simulations are examples of tightly coupled workloads.

HPC Drives Cloud Computing: An Analysis

Until now, HPC was running on-prem which involved building and hosting an HPC cluster in a data center. This activity caused an arm and a leg for many organizations.

However, with the advent of the Cloud, HPC as a service (HPCaaS) provides a flexible, scalable and cost-effective way of managing the HPC. HPCaaS enables users to deploy HPC clusters on Cloud infrastructure and leverage capabilities like data analytics and AI.

Factors That Are Motivating the Demand for HPC

Powerful Real-time Insights

Be it any industry or sector, enterprises can gain powerful real-time insights from HPC applications solving highly advanced and complex issues. For instance, HPC helps in the detection of credit card fraud and minimizes false positives, even if the fraudulent activities become more evolved and sophisticated.

Exoscale Computing

Exoscale Computing is powered with the capability of performing more than a billion calculations per second. The performance is measured in exaFLOPS. You can improve advanced stimulation modelling in the areas of scientific discoveries and natural disaster predictions with Exoscale Computing.

Low-latency Remote Direct Access Memory Networking

RDMA allows the exchange of data in-memory by bypassing the processor or the operating system. It improves throughput and performance, leading to faster data transfer rates and low latency rates.

Availability on Public and Private Cloud

Today, many cloud service providers offer HPC in public cloud. While there are some who choose to run their HPC infrastructure in traditional datacenters, many enterprises are opting to migrate their mission-critical HPC workloads to private-cloud HPC.

How High Performing Computing Has Made Inroads into Other Industries

Applications and Industries	Use Cases
Healthcare and Life Sciences	Performs genome sequencing in one day. It is useful in cancer diagnosis, drug discoveries and molecular modeling.
Finance	Helps in fraud identification, automated trading, risk analysis and Monte Carlo simulation.
Defense	Processes huge volumes of climate-related and meteorological data. HPC can also assist in energy research.
Power and Energy	Facilitates geospatial analysis, wind simulation and terrain mapping, seismic data processing and modeling.
Media and Technology	Assists in editing feature films, rendering special aftereffects and streaming live events
Manufacturing	Enables computer-aided engineering and mathematical techniques to stimulate an environment for building optimized products.

Looking for a Roadmap to Kickstart your HPC Journey? Get started with Cloud4C

The global high-performance computing market was estimated at $ 48.51 billion in 2022 and is predicted to grow at 7.5% from 2023 to 2030. The HPC Cloud market is predicted to grow at 17% a year until 2024.

There is no doubt, the Cloud is the future of HPC. And there is no better time to migrate your sensitive HPC workloads to a Cloud platform. Cloud Service Providers like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure offer more scalability and resilience to power innovation and digital transformation. Leverage their HPC tools and features to accelerate your hypercomputing journey.

Get the skills and expertise to get your HPC up and running on cloud infrastructure. Cloud4C can help you advance your R&D goals within your budgetary constraints. To unlock the full potential of HPC on the Cloud, get in touch with us today!