DCIM
CONSIDERATIONS FOR RUNNING YOUR HPC WORKLOADS With the explosive demand for high-performance computing driven in part by AI applications, what are the considerations prospective customers need to know about their data centre’s infrastructure? Arpen Tucker, Senior Business Development Manager, Vantage Data Centers UK, discusses why HPC is a different matter to simply hosting and supporting more powerful computers. High-performance computing (HPC) is now a necessity for enterprises seeking to maintain a competitive edge. The question is not whether to invest in HPC, but how best to leverage it to achieve strategic business goals. However, making the decision between housing HPC infrastructure on-premise or using colocation facilities can have a significant impact on costs, as well as your organisation’s agility and scalability. While the public cloud as a delivery model may be a viable alternative or complementary
SPACE
option for certain HPC applications and
The first consideration is whether you have sufficient space on-premise to house a high-performance system. Given that these
standard workloads, for example, highly parallelised codes or ensembles and where
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there is a high tolerance for individual job failure and execution locality is not a prerequisite, many won’t be optimised. This brings the decision down to self-build on-premise or renting your data centre space, critical infrastructure and engineering support services through colocation. The key focus areas to help with making the right decision will most probably include the following:
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