The HPC community has had a long-standing interest in creating scale-out environments for running throughput-oriented and parallel distributed workloads. Both large-scale environments (for example, cloud computing facilities) and scale-out workloads (such as Big Data) are becoming more important in the enterprise. In fact, with the rise of Big Data, the advent of affordable, powerful clusters, and strategies that take advantage of commodity systems for scale-out applications, these days the enterprise computing environment is looking a lot like HPC.
Both the enterprise and the HPC communities share a number of common concerns and requirements:
- Scale-out management
- Reduced power and cooling costs and lower data center density
- Need for dynamic resource management
- Need for high utilization, high availability
- Parallelization for multicore and heterogeneous HPC systems
- Big Data analytics
- Application resiliency
- Low latency communications
- Interest in cloud computing
The combination of virtualization and cloud computing provides value to both the end users and IT providers in HPC and enterprise environments. And, once created, these private clouds can be burst to a hybrid cloud to create seamless and secure extensions of the organization’s on-premise infrastructure.
Performance is the key. VMware’s approach to HPC and enterprise virtualization adds a level of flexibility and agility that cannot be achieved in bare metal environments.
The HPC community can realize significant benefits from adopting enterprise-capable IT solutions grounded in proven virtualization and cloud technology. And conversely, as business IT environments become increasingly compute-intensive, lessons learned by the scientists and engineers working with HPC can be transferred to their counterparts in the enterprise. It’s a win-win situation.
This article is the seventh in an editorial series that explores the benefits of leveraging HPC virtualization and public or private clouds. You download the complete series in PDF form the insideHPC White Paper Library, courtesy of VMware.
