High performance computing, the latest ‘it’ thing in the cloud

Grazed from NetworkWorld. Author: Brandon Butler.

Every few months something new pops up as the latest and greatest feature touted by cloud providers. Earlier this year it was platform-as-a-service (PaaS) offerings. Recently, vendors have been pushing free or low-cost versions of their clouds. Now, perhaps it’s time for high performance computing to have its turn in the spotlight.

This week, a new entrant into the market named ProfitBricks is coming forth with impressive network speed capabilities in its cloud, according to an independent review of the European company’s performance. This falls in line with Amazon Web Services, which released a solid-state disk high input/output compute option over the summer…

ProfitBricks uses InfiniBand, a wired fabric that allows more than triple the data transfer rate between servers as compared to two of the industry’s biggest players, Amazon and Rackspace, according to a test conducted by Cloud Spectator. "No one really comes up to their level in terms of networking speed in the U.S.," says Kenny Li, co-founder of the cloud analytics firm.

ProfitBricks is a European company founded in 2010 by Achim Weiss and Andreas Gauger, whose former managed hosting company, 1&1, was sold to United Internet and now is a leading international Web hosting company. It raised $18 million in venture funding, including from United Internet, and has had customers in beta in the U.S. and Europe until making its services generally available this week.

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