DoE Exascale System Designs Drive Innovations

First quarter 2018 HPC server revenues were strong, with notable high quarter over quarter growth from the first quarter of last year. Hyperion Research has been analyzing the data to ascertain what these numbers mean and what they may indicate about full-year 2018 in HPC. These assessments incorporate Hyperion Research discussions with a global base of people in the HPC sector as well as an analysis of the Hyperion Research QView database, a long-standing collection of quarterly revenues and projections for the major HPC vendors.

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.