IBM will soon be offering on-demand high-performance computing

In yet another announcement of a new cloud infrastructure service this week, IBM unveiled a hybrid-cloud solution for workloads that require high-performance hardware. The company will essentially set up a dedicated high-octane compute cluster for a customer at one of its data centers and connect it seamlessly to servers in the customer’s own data center, throwing in some new workload management and analytics software.

There was a time when high-performance computing (HPC), then almost exclusively referred to as “supercomputing,” was strictly the domain of a well-defined set of vertical markets, each with a specific set of needs that demanded the best computing performance that money could buy. But things have changed, and HPC is now a potential game-changer in mainstream business, especially when dealing with the huge amounts of data that can be collected and analyzed for almost any business model. Still at the high end of the cost model for computing resources, HOC got a significant boost when vendors began offering HPC cloud services, allowing business users to get their feet wet with the gigantic upfront costs usually associated with HPC. And in its latest announcement, IBM has combined the latest in cloud technology, computer hardware, and HPC software to offer customers custom HPC solutions as an on-demand service.