AWS New Bare Metal Instance: Courting the HPC Crowd by Combining Bare Metal Performance with Virtualized Cloud Functionality

The Department of Energy at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) recently announced plans for the development of a 1.5 exaflops system called Frontier to be delivered in 2021. US HPC maker Cray and chip maker AMD are the two key US commercial partners in this effort. Despite numerous press articles centered on the 1.5 exaflops peak performance of Frontier, ORNL's original RFP released in April of 2018 clearly called out the diverse workload requirements that Frontier would have to successfully handle that span the traditional modeling and simulation sector, big data analysis, and AI applications, while demonstrating a 50X improvement in solving key DOE science problems that today run at the 20 petaflops level. To meet those ambitious goals, strong support from DOE's companion $1.7 billion Exascale Computing Project (ECP) will be critical.

On April 16, 2018, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) in conjunction with SUSE and Arm teamed up with three leading UK universities to form the Catalyst UK program with the objective of accelerating the adoption of HPC by industry in the UK. The three-year program will center on the installation of an Arm processor-based supercomputer deployment spread across the University of Edinburgh, the University of Bristol, and the University of Leicester, due to be completed in summer 2018. In addition, the program is looking to reach out to UK industry to jointly develop Arm-based applications and workflows. Hyperion Research believes this effort is an important indicator of the UK’s commitment to building an indigenous HPC ecosystem centered on Arm processors, and one that could have wider implications for bolstering Arm-based HPC adoption in future European HPC designs.