Planetary-Scale Computing – 9.95 PFLOPS & Position 41 on the TOP500 List
Weather forecasting, genome sequencing, geoanalytics, computational fluid dynamics (CFD), and other types of high-performance computing (HPC) workloads can take advantage of massive amounts of compute power. These workloads are often spikey and massively parallel, and are used in situations where time to results is critical.
Old Way Governments, well-funded research organizations, and Fortune 500 companies invest tens of millions of dollars in supercomputers in an attempt to gain a competitive edge. Building a state-of-the-art supercomputer requires specialized expertise, years of planning, and a long-term commitment to the architecture and the implementation. Once built, the supercomputer must be kept busy in order to justify the investment, resulting in lengthy queues while jobs wait their turn. Adding capacity and taking advantage of new technology is costly and can also be disruptive.
New Way It is now possible to build a virtual supercomputer in the cloud! Instead of committing tens of millions of dollars over the course of a decade or more, you simply acquire the resources you need, solve your problem, and release the resources. You can get as much power as you need, when you need it, and only when you need it. Instead of force-fitting your problem to the available resources, you figure out how many resources you need, get them, and solve the problem in the most natural and expeditious way possible. You do not need to make a decade-long commitment to a single processor architecture, and you can easily adopt new technology as it becomes available. You can perform experiments at any scale without long term commitment, and you can gain experience with emerging technologies such as GPUs and specialized hardware for machine learning training and inferencing.
