HPC finally climbs into the cloud
Grazed from ScientificComputing. Author: Editorial Staff.
Although commerce and consumers have been computing in the cloud for years, the high-performance computing sector has been more hesitant. But all that may now be changing. The cost of cloud computing for HPC is falling, while new programming models that will allow HPC workloads to run more efficiently in the cloud are becoming available. ‘Public cloud’ providers are installing hardware configurations that are more suited to HPC, while private clouds are giving users experience of how to run their jobs in a cloud environment.
Nonetheless, HPC in the cloud has not got off to a flying start. The market research company Intersect360 reported last year that the HPC users they surveyed spent only about three per cent of their budgets on cloud computing – and the percentage has not changed much over the past five years…
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You don’t need a weatherman to see that clouds are quickly building. American companies are moving workloads to big public computing clouds from Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, and others at an unprecedented rate, spurring a massive data center building boom. But will IBM i shops fall in line and move to the cloud? That’s where the forecast gets a little iffy.
IBM has announced that the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) has authorized the company to deliver IBM Cloud services at the highest security levels—known as Impact Level 5—for Controlled Unclassified Information as defined by the U.S. Department of Defense. The DISA authorization enables DoD agencies to take advantage of IBM’s cloud offerings to support applications and manage sensitive data. DISA has granted IBM a "conditional authority to operate" IBM Cloud services hosted at the Allegany Ballistics Laboratory data center in West Virginia, which is owned by the Department of the Navy and leased by IBM.
Netflix, which began shifting its billions of hours of film and TV content to Amazon’s cloud in 2008, has finally finished that process. In a post on its blog Thursday, Netflix said it had migrated the last of the data stored in its own facilities to Amazon Web Services—a shift that Netflix credited with its fast speeds and eight-fold membership growth since it began the transition seven years ago.