Risk mitigation in HPC: Why it’s not as hard as you think

The High Performance Computing (HPC) landscape has changed dramatically over the past two decades. As HPC has become a more mainstream technology, it’s changed the design and engineering world forever. Organizations that can adapt can enhance their capabilities and improve their market standing and competitive advantage.

HPC offers many benefits, including fast processing speeds, flexible deployments, and improved total cost of ownership. However, designing an HPC platform for unique workloads will always incur some risk because of the complexities involved.

HPC platforms must be well-designed to work seamlessly and integrate with existing systems and networks. But this can be challenging for organizations that have grown their IT infrastructure organically over time. Disparate data sources, legacy systems, and shadow integrations must still be brought together to harness the power of HPC without introducing unnecessary risks.

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New Technologies Can be Risky

Adding or changing IT infrastructure or technologies always has an element of risk. There’s the financial risk of spending a lot on a solution that’s not right for your organization. The risk of implementing technology that isn’t compatible with your HPC design or that your HPC design doesn’t integrate with your current network. There’s also the risk of needing help to find the right people to work on your HPC systems because of the IT staffing shortage in specific disciplines.

Reducing the Fear of HPC Technologies

For many organizations, emerging and evolving HPC technologies may seem too advanced or complex. They don’t have the time or expertise to test and validate the new technologies, even if they may be right for them. They can’t analyze potential integration conflicts or obstacles quickly or adequately enough to know if it’ll offer performance gains or save them money in the long run.

That’s why Penguin Computing™ invests heavily in research and development to test and validate emerging HPC technologies. As soon as the new technology is released on the market, we put it through a formal test process in our test environment to verify its functionality and demonstrate its impact. Using this approach, we can take individual components of HPC and build them into known architectures and solutions. We’ll see how it reacts and affects solutions with network architectures many of our customers already use so we can offer the best HPC design plan for it.

Reducing the Financial Risk

Introducing new solutions to a tech stack is always a little nerve-wracking, especially when it can have a widespread or fundamental impact on an organization. HPC solutions are expensive because they need significant computing power to run, and most organizations can’t afford to deploy the necessary computing hardware on-premise. Ingesting, storing, and analyzing massive amounts of data in-house is too cost-prohibitive.

Moving HPC workloads to the cloud with Amazon Web Services HPC, Oracle HPC, or Penguin Computing on Demand reduces the financial risk of deploying an HPC platform. These solutions use containers, virtualization, and consumption-based workloads to make it more cost-effective to deploy an HPC solution into a network.

For example, Formula 1 race cars used cloud-based HPC solutions to reduce their computational fluid dynamic technology environment and wind tunnel testing costs by 30%. Car manufacturer, Mazda, reduced its total cost of ownership by 50% over five years and improved its on-premise data center performance by 70% by moving to a cloud-based HPC environment.

Eliminating the Expertise Risk

A study by EY revealed that 53% of senior executives identify data and analytics as their top investment priorities in the next two years. At the same time, however, there's a continuing shortage of skilled IT professionals, data scientists, and data architects to leverage HPC.

The lack of qualified, skilled engineers has become so common that 64% of IT executives surveyed by Gartner say it’s their most significant obstacle to implementing emerging technologies like HPC. Organizations looking to deploy HPC in any part of their architecture must consider working with partners or vendors that can overcome the resourcing challenge. Partners like Penguin Computing already have the people and expertise on staff to help organizations design and deploy an HPC solution that works for them so that they can mitigate the risk entirely. (Plus, save time and effort by skipping the full-time employee onboarding and overhead.)

Penguin Computing is the Right Choice for HPC Risk Mitigation

Organizations need to manage all of these risks to avoid limiting the capability and power of HPC and all it can bring. It requires an HPC expert to avoid costly financial and time-consuming mistakes.

At Penguin Computing, we go through a robust discovery process to understand hardware and software, workload requirements, and core competencies within the HPC market. While we have years of experience with predefined solutions, we create custom solutions within the hardware and software stack that meet the organization’s unique goals.

Our data practice experts focus on architecting the right data workflow and solutions to maximize our customer’s HPC architecture. Penguin Computing knows how to design new workflows optimized for what you’re doing today, what can integrate with legacy solutions and be flexible enough to adapt in the future.

When we design a solution for an HPC customer, we aim to solve their specific obstacles while mitigating the risks associated with HPC for them. We look at the entire network and design a solution that works at all levels, from the high-level workflows to the fine point integrations, so your HPC system is user-friendly, accessible, and valuable to your business.

Working with us lets organizations focus on business and workflow, not infrastructure.

We accelerate digital transformation with the power of emerging technologies like HPC so our customers can tackle the most complex business challenges with the latest tech. Contact Penguin Computing today to see how we can drive innovation for your business with ready-to-run HPC solutions.