High-performance computing has traditionally been thought of as something that happens in government labs and supercomputers and is not used widely. But it is also happening in businesses around the world in energy exploration, manufacturing, drug discovery and financial modeling. And HPC is starting to be used on the cloud in more and more ways. 

“High-performance computing is truly just changing the world,” said Trish Damkroger (pictured), vice president and general manager of the Technical Computing Initiative at Intel. “Sometimes people don’t realize that high-performance computing infrastructure is kind of that basics that you use whenever you need to do something with dense compute.”

Damkroger spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They discussed HPC and Intel’s partnership with AWS to help bring HPC to the cloud. (* Disclosure below.)

Seamless HPC on-prem or in the cloud

Intel’s Xeon Scalable processors are the foundation for much of HPC, according to Damkroger. However, HPC is growing on the cloud in recent years, and Intel is actually partnering with Amazon Web Services Inc. to help make HPC easier to access.

“With AWS, we have this wonderful partnership where Intel is not only bringing the hardware … but we’re also having accelerators, and then on that whole … ecosystem where we work closely with our ISV and OSV partners,” Damkroger described. “And we bring not only compilers, but also analyzers and our full tool suites, so people can move between an on-premises station to a public cloud like AWS seamlessly.”

Intel has also developed the Intel HPC Platform Specification, which provides a set of compute, fabric, memory, storage and software requirements to help achieve a high standard of quality and compatibility with HPC workloads, whether running on-prem or in the cloud — and AWS’ ParallelCluster service is compliant with this specification.

Intel continues to look for areas of collaboration with AWS to improve the HPC experience in the cloud, and the Intel Select Solutions running on AWS’ ParallelCluster is a great example of that, according to Damkroger. The HPC has a reputation of being hard, and the whole philosophy behind the Intel Select Solutions is to make it easier for customers to run HPC workloads in the cloud or on-prem.

“With the Intel Select Solutions, it’s also about scaling your job across a large number of nodes, so we’ve made a significant investment into the full stack,” Damkroger stated. “So Amazon Web Services is the first cloud service provider to actually verify a service such as Intel Select Solutions — and this … means that somebody can say, ‘It works today on-prem, and I know it will work exactly the same in AWS cloud.'”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Intel sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Intel nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE