HPC and Containers – An Intriguing Combination

Hyperion Research recently closed the books on the 2018 year for the high performance computing market in our market tracking database, the QView. 2018 was another high growth year, with the server market reaching $13.7 billion, and the total market (servers, storage, software and technical support service) totaling more than $27.6 billion. The market has continued to grow at a steady rate of around 6% for the past 5 years.

This Quick Take looks at Amazon's recent announcement of a new EC2 Bare Metal offering that provides users with direct, non-virtualized access to a processor, memory, storage and related networking instance. Amazon uses custom hardware in an effort to wring out the highest possible performance from the basic hardware set up while still offering a full complement of cloud-based software support. This development is a positive one for HPC users looking to migrate workloads to public clouds as Amazon is addressing one of the most vexinghurdles of HPC in the cloud: the performance overhead of running applicationsin a virtualized, performance limiting environment.