Is the cloud ready for high-powered performance?
Now part of the mainstream IT vocabulary, cloud computing has become a legitimate infrastructure resource choice for many applications in the high powered computing (HPC) community. When demand outstrips capacity, Ken Hertsler, vice president product management at Platform Computing says it’s time to look to the cloud.
High powered computing (HPC) application workloads are often spiky and, depending on project deadlines and needed application runs, the demand for additional compute resources can surge well above the running average demand. When IT departments buy, build, and maintain clusters to handle peak loads it can be expensive (eg hardware acquisition), time consuming (eg additional management time), and wasteful (eg expensive resources sitting idle).
