ORNL HPC is Proving Invaluable for Covid-19 Research

Taiwan-based TSMC, the world's largest chip foundry, recently announced (https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332869) that high performance computing (HPC) has supplanted smart phones as the most important driver of its business, although presumably not yet the largest financially.

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.