High Performance Computing (HPC) has been an important enabler for the success of engineering organizations. Not only because it speeds up product time to market and reduces development costs, but also, because it drives innovation and helps stay competitive.
Until recently, engineers relied on their workstations and on-premises compute clusters for their HPC simulations. The downside, a workstation is not suitable for running very large, compute intensive simulation jobs. And on-premises clusters are not the best solution for an organization, here is why:
- Upfront hardware investment, costs for ongoing maintenance and upgrades make on-premises clusters very expensive.
- Within a year of the purchase, there is a high chance for the availability of faster, better hardware in the market that will outperform the current cluster.
- Engineers will have to work with limited resources and their jobs will still end up in queues.
Growing Adoption of Cloud
Over the years, cloud computing has seen adoption across many different industries; financial services, education, healthcare, high-tech are only a few examples. IDG’s 2018 Cloud Computing Survey reports that nine out of ten companies will have already adopted the cloud by 2019 as part of their infrastructure or applications.
Cloud computing brings great benefits to engineering organizations. Provides access to best-in-class hardware, lowers ongoing costs and helps delegate technology to experts, so that organizations do not have to deal with operational challenges. With so many companies adopting, to stay competitive, it is time engineering organizations plan their digital transformation to the cloud.
High Performance Computing in the Cloud
Today, with the availability of HPC capable powerful hardware in the cloud and experienced HPC cloud simulation solution providers, there is nothing holding engineers back from running their simulations in the cloud.
For less than one dollar per hour, one can access powerful CPUs, GPUs that speed up simulations by many times. Getting access to resources based on specific hardware requirements on demand, without the need for any large upfront investments helps organizations reduce costs. Greater benefit comes for the engineers, who can now run multiple simulations instantly and simultaneously without having to wait in queues. With the right solution, it is possible to automatically scale up compute resources based on need.
Future of HPC
The next generation of hardware are already on their way. Processor speeds are increasing, so are the number of cores in CPUs and GPUs. The developments of increasingly parallel processors and evolving technologies, will lead CAE applications to support much faster calculations. Only pointing to the fact that by tying their HPC to solely on-premises clusters, one may be taking a hit on competitive advantage.
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