When we speak with customers running HPC workloads on-premises – we often hear similar fundamental challenges. Both business and technology needs are changing so rapidly that this fixed infrastructure just can’t keep up. Striking a balance of providing the appropriate resources to the right users at the time that they’re needed is extremely challenging. There’s also a challenge with an ever-increasing set of business demands—new regulation for example, or new use cases all putting pressure on HPC infrastructure by creating variability in demand. Another challenge is creating collaboration with the right level of control. Traditionally, HPC environments are siloed and not necessarily the purview of central IT and that limits collaboration

A cloud platform is, by definition, the only place where organizations can take advantage of true elasticity over massive compute scale.​

In this context, an organization can take advantage of a cloud environment to better accommodate the variable demand for compute. This would be in the form of bursting a workload out to the cloud or expanding their own computing environment into the cloud. Either way can be used to accommodate inconsistent demand spikes.​

As jobs get more predictable and shifts in resource allocation become more recognizable, an organization could opt to get out of the HPC IT business completely and build a cloud-native model for HPC.​

We’ve found that implementing a true cloud-native model may take an organization more time to set up and manage long term, but ultimately it is the most efficient use of resources for inconsistent demand spikes for compute. In this model, there’s no unused infrastructure. There are no gaps between what is there and what is being consumed. It’s an optimized model where usage mirrors demand in a 1:1 relationship, maximizing the resources for the work that needs to be done.​

Why HPC in Azure?

Azure high-performance computing (HPC) is a complete set of computing, networking, and storage resources integrated with workload orchestration services for HPC applications. With purpose-built infrastructure and optimized application services, Azure offers HPC customers a competitive price/performance against on-premises solutions with additional benefits. Additionally, Azure includes next-generation machine learning tools to drive smarter simulations and empower intelligent decision making.

High performance computing in Azure is a means of bringing more computing power to bear on the challenges we previously mentioned. Azure HPC has been designed as a market-leading HPC solution combining the best of supercomputing and cloud approaches. Most importantly – Azure’s HPC platform has been designed around you, the inventor. Azure supports a smooth path from your baseline—so you can use the same trusted tools and processes to work with your overall workflow. The engine underneath is Microsoft’s purpose-built HPC infrastructure, which delivers scale and speed to you. They don’t ask you to change your work to fit a vanilla cloud—the Azure HPC cloud is built to fit your workloads, including tightly coupled workloads, using the latest CPUs from Intel and AMD, plus GPUs—all backed by low latency high bandwidth Infiniband interconnect.

Azure HPC also supports AI workloads, using GPU and CPU as appropriate, presenting the opportunity to add intelligence to the simulations workflows to help with parameter studies, results analysis, and more.

Azure high-performance computing (HPC) is a complete set of computing, networking, and storage resources integrated with workload orchestration services for HPC applications. With purpose-built infrastructure and optimized application services, Azure offers HPC customers a competitive price/performance against on-premises solutions with additional benefits. Additionally, Azure includes next-generation machine learning tools to drive smarter simulations and empower intelligent decision making.

Of course we’ve just scratched the surface of why 95% of Fortune 500 businesses rely on Azure to meet their cloud computing needs. Over the next several weeks, we’re going to be taking a closer look at how various industries are leveraging the capabilities of Azure’s HPC platform.

To learn more about the role Oakwood is playing in HPC, please CLICK HERE.

If you have questions or would like to speak with one of our HPC experts, please drop us a note below.