In technology supply terms, HPE is one of the companies leading the way in the use of AI, automation and analytics in businesses large and small. The aim is to give all companies superpowers, or at least supercomputing capabilities, when it comes to understanding and exploiting their data
HPE is now planning to make its HPC and supercomputing products available to customers as a cloud-like consumption-based managed service using its Greenlake platform.
“We’re trying to build supercomputers so they look and feel like they’re from the cloud, but they scale and run and perform like a supercomputer. We’re really blending those two worlds … to make them much more broadly applicable [to enterprises] than supercomputers in the past.”
Peter Ungaro, SVP & GM, HPC and mission critical solutions, HPE
“One of the things that we’ve been working on is building great solutions in a [capital expenditure] model, [with] the standard acquisition model that we’ve always had. Over the past few years, we’ve started to move to a model where we can do consumption-based acquisition so you don’t have to do it by capex.
What this is talking about here – and I think this is a huge step forward for us – is really being able to do it in much more of a cloud services model, which is a much more integrated environment overall and a much more increased capability. What we’re hearing from customers is that they want to have the same kind of user experience and environment that they’re getting in the public cloud.”
Peter Ungaro, SVP & GM, HPC and mission critical solutions, HPE
HPE is not alone in taking this path, but it is perhaps further along than many, and it’s mostly being driven by a desire on the customer side to keep many workloads out of the public cloud, where regular and sustained use can result in often unexpectedly high monthly bills.
“We’re approaching this whole area fundamentally differently than traditional cloud providers. We start with the leadership position in the market and then bring that capability to a cloud infrastructure rather than starting with a cloud infrastructure and trying to apply that to HPC.
Our path is to, over time, really enable everyone to gain access to our purpose-built silicon, storage and software technologies, technologies such as Slingshot, our high-speed interconnect to reduce congestion, our Cray, Apollo and ProLIant servers that give us high-density heterogeneous compute to deliver leading performance, our HPC Performance Cluster Manager to use management at scale.
To have high capacity and performance GPUs you can use as accelerators to meet specific needs in both high performance computing and AI, because more and more people are using high-performance computing infrastructures to solve problems because of how challenging they are.”
Peter Ungaro, SVP & GM, HPC and mission critical solutions, HPE
HPE’s stated aim it to offer its entire product portfolio as a service by 2022, so expect to see more announcements along these lines during 2021, including both CPU-based and GPU-accelerated solutions, the latter incorporating NVIDIA’s ultra-powerful A100 processors. A metering system will be used to charge customers based on compute and storage consumption and they will also be allowed to scale their deployments both up and down.
Source: The Next Platform