Historical View of the On-Premises HPC Server Market by Competitive Segment, 2017-2022

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.

IBM's decision to acquire Red Hat not only boosts the combined firm's potential to exploit the overall cloud market, but it will likely have a significant impact on the global technical computing market as well. This is based on the rapidly growing number of enterprise IT data centers that are integrating HPC into their AI and other data-intensive workloads that their enterprise servers cannot effectively handle alone.