OREANDA-NEWS.  At the International Supercomputing Conference, HP today announced a High Performance Computing (HPC) alliance with Intel Corporation created to advance customer innovation and help expand accessibility of HPC to enterprises of all sizes. To increase accessibility of HPC, the companies will launch a new Center of Excellence (CoE), which is designed to bring a community of experts from both companies to support customers in planning, developing, deploying and managing HPC solutions.

The promise of HPC is rapidly expanding beyond governments and academia to enterprises of all sizes that want to accelerate the pace of big data analytics and business insight. In fact, the International Data Corporation forecasts that the base HPC compute server market will reach $15.2 billion in 2019 , as organizations seek to adopt HPC technologies to run advanced analytics and big data workloads.

There is a perfect storm of market dynamics driving the accelerated demand for HPC across commercial enterprises including:

  • A wealth of new big data sources from the adoption of mobility, cloud computing, multimedia, social collaboration and the Internet of Things (IoT)
  • The rapid transformation of business processes across key industries, such as oil exploration, human genomics and real-time financial trading
  • Recent advancements in processing technology that enable new levels of compute efficiency, scalability and ultra-high-speed processing performance, at a price-point that aligns with traditional general purpose IT

As a result, commercial enterprises are finally in a position to leverage HPC to accelerate business innovation.  With this alliance, companies now have the much needed accessibility to best-of-breed Intel and HP technology, industry-optimized HPC solutions from HP and the HPC CoEs with experts who can help achieve business goals.

“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,” said Bill Mannel, vice president and general manager, HPC and Big Data, HP Servers. “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.”

Purpose-built Compute Platforms Customized for HPC customers
As a result of the new alliance, HP is offering its HPC Solutions Framework based on HP Apollo servers, which are specialized for HPC and now optimized to support industry-specific software applications from an ecosystem of leading independent software vendors (ISV).  These solutions will dramatically simplify the deployment of HPC for customers in industries such as oil and gas, life sciences and financial services.  The HP Apollo product line integrates Intel’s technology innovation from its HPC scalable system framework, which helps to extend the resilience, reliability, power efficiency and price/performance of the HP Apollo solutions. 

To provide finely tuned and well-balanced systems that focus on unique customer workloads and application performance, the systems will leverage next-generation Intel® Xeon® processors, the Intel® Xeon Phi™ product family, Intel® Omni-Path interconnect technology and the Intel® Enterprise Edition of Lustre*.

“Enterprises large and small are grappling with the growing challenges of increased model complexity and data sizes,” said Charles Wuischpard, vice president Data Center Group, general manager Workstations and High Performance Computing at Intel. “Intel’s HPC scalable system framework is a flexible blueprint for both computationally and data-intensive computing that provides optimized system performance at any scale – while maintaining reliability and ease of programming through open standards.  HP Apollo systems implementing the framework will be tailored to meet the stringent compute, I/O, memory and storage needs for HPC customers’ workloads.”

These purpose-built HP Apollo Compute platforms will be tailored for a wide range of workload-optimized solutions while enhancing data center efficiency and enabling the foundational infrastructure to process, analyze and manage data.  They can be customized to address unique customer requirements and address HPC and big data challenges.

HP Expands Center of Excellence for HPC
The HPC CoE is designed to make it easier for customers to use and deploy HPC solutions and enhance their overall experience with a very unique blend of vertical industry skills and ISV partner relationships.  It augments the innovative capabilities to deliver a rich customer experience, engineering, code modernization skills and a pool of domain experts to deliver differentiated business outcomes.   HP and Intel are enhancing capabilities at the HPC CoE in Grenoble, France, including providing customers with the opportunity to work with ISVs, and HP/Intel engineers to modernize code. The HP/Intel CoE in Grenoble enables customers, developers and ISVs to carry out proof of concept, benchmarks and characterizations to optimize the infrastructure for HPC-related workloads.  HP and Intel will also open a new CoE in Houston, Texas to better support the North American market.

The dedicated infrastructure and expertise available at the CoEs, as well as a broad portfolio of services, can be used on-site or accessed remotely.