UPDATED 01:55 EDT / JULY 14 2015

NEWS

HP and Intel bid to push HPC into the enterprise

Hewlett-Packard Co. has teamed up with Intel Corp. to launch an assault on the high-performance computing (HPC) niche, the companies said in an announcement at the International Supercomputing Conference in Frankfurt, Germany, yesterday. The two firms are hoping to capture a sizeable share of the growing market for HPC in the enterprise, IDG News Service reported.

The companies aren’t just looking to sell HPC products, but also detailed a go-to-market strategy to deliver their solutions to a variety of industries. In other words, HP and Intel aren’t just limiting themselves to traditional use cases in areas like academia and government, as they’ll go all out to expand into commercial enterprises with vertical-specific solutions.

Central to this plan is the launch of a new HPC Center of Excellence in Texas, plus enhancements to an existing center in France, offering more streamlined go-to-market collaboration. Experts from both firms will be on hand in the centers to offer customer support in planning, developing, deploying and managing their HPC solutions. As such, the partnership ensures a high-level of cooperation on the technology front between both companies.

HP and Intel’s collaboration is a timely one because it comes at a time when HPC is rapidly being embraced by commercial enterprises seeking to gain better business insights through Big Data analysis. According to International Data Corp. (IDC), the HPC compute server market will reap in as much as $15.2 billion a year by 2019. Everything points towards a ‘perfect storm’ for HPC, as the amount of enterprise data grows exponentially in an increasingly connected world, while business are rapidly transforming themselves to try and take advantage of it. More importantly perhaps, Intel says that data processing technology has become inexpensive enough for traditional IT to take advantage of it, making HPC affordable to any industry that requires it.

The first all-purpose solution the two firms are offering is called the HPC Solutions Framework, which runs on HP’s Apollo Servers and integrates Intel’s Xeon processors and the HPC scalable system framework. In addition, HP is offering a range of custom-built Apollo Compute platforms tailor made to conduct data analysis on a wide range of workloads.

“As data explodes in volume, velocity and variety, and the processing requirements to address business challenges become more sophisticated, the line between traditional and high-performance computing is blurring,” Bill Mannel, vice president and general manager, HPC and Big Data, HP Servers, said in prepared remarks. “With this alliance, we are giving customers access to the technologies and solutions as well as the intellectual property, portfolio services and engineering support needed to evolve their compute infrastructure to capitalize on a data-driven environment.”

HP and Intel aren’t alone in this endeavour though. The likes of Google, IBM and NVIDIA Corp. are making a similar push with the OpenPOWER initiative, and that’s a direct threat to Intel as its Power Architecture set is free to use under a liberal license granted by IBM. The effort has already made inroads, with IBM opening a few HPC Centers of its own in Europe, and recently tying up a lucrative deal to supply HPC to the UK government.

In response, HP and Intel say they will enhance the capabilities of their HPC Center of Excellence in Grenoble, France, giving customers the chance to work with engineers from HP and Intel in order to modernize code. At the center, customers, developers and ISVs can all carry out benchmarks, characterizations and proof of concept work to optimize infrastructure for their HPC workloads.

The new Houston-based HPC Center will offer similar capabilities to the North American market, the companies said.

Photo Credit: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory – PNNL via Compfight cc

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