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

Major government buyers we interviewed consistently named Cray as one of the handful of global supercomputer makers capable of true innovation at the system architecture level. These vendors maintain their ability to stay at the forefront of the HPC market by continually reinventing themselves and their products. Cray's capture of the $600 million CORAL 2 contract to deliver the 1.5-exaflops Frontier supercomputer to ORNL in 2021 is the company's latest demonstration of its ability to mutate in response to the evolving HPC market environment.

This Quick Take looks at the growing availability of commercial cloud-based quantum computing (QC), supported through either direct access to true QC systems or QC simulators based on traditional digital hardware. In addition to QC hardware, most cloud-based QC providers are also rolling out their own software development environments to help existing and new QC software developers more effectively explore QC programming. The choice of options for potential QC users is growing, and each of the QC providers offers a distinct take on QC architecture and programming.