IBM extends the possibilities and accessibility of hpc using the cloud

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/34704.wss

Armonk, NY, USA – 09 Jun 2011: IBM today announced new high performance computing (HPC) cloud offerings to help clients tackle advanced  scientific and technical computing workloads like analytics, simulations for product development, climate research and life sciences.

Today, many organizations operate with separate pools of high performance computing systems. The HPC cloud offerings from IBM will allow clients to link computing resources across their organizations into a single, high performance, private cloud while providing system administrators the flexibility to set priorities based on business or technical needs.

In order for cloud computing to be cost efficient for scientific use, clouds must be optimized for scientific applications, according to a paper written by Lawrence Berkeley Lab as part of its Magellan Project. IBM is currently the only major vendor to offer a private cloud solution tuned for HPC users.

By knitting disparate systems together into one centralized resource, clients can gain easier access to more computing that can be used to support their most important business priorities. For example, instead of segmenting computing resources by department, life sciences organizations can now pool systems from across the organization and devote them as needed to their most pressing, intensive projects like drug discovery or analysis of massive amounts of genomic data without the need to seek outside resources.

Extending their high performance cloud offerings not only creates opportunities for IBM, it also drives innovation of hpc in the cloud space, and also creates opportunities as research organizations and institutions realize the potential of hpc solutions using cloud technologies, and more importantly make some projects possible as a result of the reduce acquisition or start up costs through the cloud delivery mechanism, pay on use. That I can pay on use, avoid the initial capex costs and barriers to entry might create further opportunities for research, further discoveries and further adoption of hpc and cloud technologies alike which has to be a good thing for both vendor and end user communities.

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