Partners: HPE GreenLake HPC Is A Supercomputing-For-The-Masses Game Changer

‘Before this, only the most privileged companies had access to a supercomputer,’ says Nth Generation Chief Technology Officer Dan Molina. ‘This is going to level the playing field, allowing a vast number of new organizations access to supercomputing power. The seven figure investment to get access to supercomputing power is being drastically cut to a fraction of that with this service.’

The new Hewlett Packard Enterprise GreenLake HPC pay-per-use cloud service unveiled Wednesday breaks the high priced barrier that prevented midsize and small businesses from access to robust supercomputing solutions, said HPE partners.

“Before this, only the most privileged companies had access to a supercomputer,” said Dan Molina, chief technology officer for Nth Generation, San Diego, one of HPE‘s top enterprise partners and No. 297 on the CRN SP500. “This is going to level the playing field, allowing a vast number of new organizations access to supercomputing power. The seven-figure investment to get access to supercomputing power is being drastically cut to a fraction of that with this service. And customers only pay for what they use. This is huge!”

The new HPE GreenLake cloud service – which is available from HPE partners- will initially be offered on HPE Apollo systems starting next spring.

[RELATED: GreenLake HPC Supercomputing As A Service: 6 Things You Need To Know]

Nth Generation is already strategizing to bring the new GreenLake HPC cloud service to many of its customers, said Molina. He said many Nth Generation customers are dealing with big data sets, but up until now have not had access to affordable supercomputing solutions to drive game changing business insights.

“There are plenty of verticals out there that require this type of computing power to make their business more agile and successful,” he said. “You are going to see the number of use cases for this service just explode especially with more customers getting on the AI and machine learning bandwagon. This is a game changer for many small and midsize organizations that were waiting for an opportunity like this to get access to supercomputing power. ”

HPE said the service will slash the big-ticket, capital expenditure price for HPC systems that previously cost hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars by 40 percent. What’s more, HPE said the new service will speed up the deployment of HPC rollouts by 75 percent.

“HPE is accelerating our mainstream adoption for high performance computing through HPE GreenLake, so think of this as delivering supercomputing as a service to the masses,” said HPE GreenLake Cloud Services Business Group General Manager Keith White. “We have a unique opportunity to provide customers with the power of an agile, elastic pay per use cloud experience with HPE’s market leading HPC systems.”

The GreenLake HPC service is aimed at bringing supercomputing technologies “from the peak of the pyramid” to a single rack or a single server for any small or midsize data center or even for HPE colocation providers, said HPE Senior President and General Manager of HPC and Mission Critical Systems Peter Ungaro.

“This is really about a new era of computing where we’re going to take the very same exascale era technologies that we are building for massive systems and use that very same HPC technology to harness the explosion of data that is happening in every enterprise, large and small,” said Ungaro. “We are going to help those customers process that data and unlock insights faster.”

Erik Krucker, CTO at Comport Consulting, an HPE Platinum partner, No. 314 on the CRN Solution Provider 500, said he sees supercomputing services – including GreenLake HPC- becoming one of the largest segments of Comport’s business over the next several years.

“Customers no longer have to plunk down muiltimillion dollar capital expenditures to get a supercomputing environment going with GreenLake,” he said. “This is going to be hugely beneficial for big pharma, life sciences, financial services and healthcare. Customers want to pay for this kind of service when they need it and pay for it as they go.”

Comport has been investing heavily over the last year to help its customers build out supercomputing infrastructure solutions under its ComportSecure data intelligence practice, said Krucker. “We’ve been putting a tremendous amount of resources into this because so many of our customers are doing high performance compute, AI and machine learning,” said Krucker.

Many customers are looking to Comport to maintain, manage and secure their high performance compute infrastructure, said Krucker. “We’re dealing with data scientists and programmers that are writing AI/ML applications,” he said. “They need a lot of help deploying and operating these systems on a day to day basis. These systems need a lot of tweaking and optimization for the specific AI/ML workloads. It’s hugely valuable and beneficial if we can come in with HPE and help those customers work with the application developers to optimize these systems for specific workloads”

Comport sees big market growth ahead for GreenLake on premise cloud infrastructure, said Krucker. “There is a huge demand in the market for on premise infrastructure that customers consume as a service, particularly in HPC because the amount of data that you need to move to put it out in the cloud is typically cost-prohibitive,” he said. “You are moving large data sets, in some cases a petabyte worth of data that you need to crunch and analyze. Moving that out to the cloud and egressing it back to the cloud is generally cost prohibitive.”

HPE, for its part, is also seeing customers bristle at high priced public cloud egress fees for massive data sets. “What people are finding especially in these HPC scenarios is that the data sets are massive and there is a charge when you bring data back down to do certain things with it,” said White, referring to public cloud data egress charges.”Many customers are finding (that those egress charges) are quite expensive.”

Another big issue for public cloud providers is the data latency issues that come with moving big data sets from the edge to the public cloud, said White.“You need that instaneous computation,” said White of the HPE GreenLake HPC on premise advantage, “You don’t want to be dependent on things going over the wire and coming back.”

Comport’s Krucker said the bulk of the data for most customers is still on premise because of security and governance issues. “A lot of customers don’t want the exposure of being out in the cloud,” he said.

Krucker said he sees the hybrid computing model taking hold. One customer Comport is working with is building out a high performance compute on premise solution with the ability to burst out into the cloud. “Customers want to leverage the cloud but they want some guard-rails around it,” he said. “We’re helping customers build out these HPC environments.”