Buyer’s guide: High-performance computing (HPC) for AI

Hyperscalers that offer HPC infrastructure

The major cloud service providers offer HPC scalability, pay-as-you-go pricing, and fast deployment. And these hyperscalers are on the cutting edge of how to build high-performance systems.

The trade-off is that customers are ultimately responsible for decisions on the type and scale of infrastructure, as well as managing, monitoring, and securing the data. And cloud options can be more expensive when factoring in the costs of moving large data sets data back and forth.

AWS: Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers an integrated HPC solution built on the latest chip and server technology, Amazon EC2 storage, Elastic Fabric Adapter for networking, the FSx file system, the AWS Nitro hypervisor, and AWS ParallelCluster for deployment and management of HPC clusters. AWS offers partners, such as Cognizant, Rescale, and TotalCAE, that provide a managed service on top of the HPC implementation.

Azure: Microsoft’s Azure offers a cloud-based HPC platform with compute, networking, and storage resources integrated with workload orchestration services for HPC applications. Azure also offers machine-learning tools and software for building applications with predictive analysis. In addition to the IaaS infrastructure tuned for HPC, Azure also offers a dedicated, fully managed, single-tenant Cray XC or CS series supercomputer for HPC workloads.

Google Cloud: Similarly, Google offers HPC on its Google Cloud, providing customers with a variety of options for selecting CPUs from Intel, AMD, or Arm; GPUs from Nvidia; storage options including object, block, and file storage; toolkits; best practices blueprints; and preconfigured modules.

Purpose-built HPC clouds that target AI

Several startups have come along in the past few years looking to take advantage of the AI frenzy with cloud-based platforms designed from the ground up to support HPC. Two have separated themselves from the pack, generating huge buzz in the HPC community and raising large amounts of venture-capital investment.