Lenovo announces new on-prem, high-performance computing-as-a-service product

Lenovo has announced a new on-premise high performance computing solution that it said is designed to “deliver the power of supercomputing to organizations of all sizes.” 

The new service is part of Lenovo’s existing TruScale software portfolio that puts all of Lenovo’s scalable IT services under one umbrella. Called High Performance Computing as a service (HPCaaS), Lenovo said it can eliminate some of the biggest drawbacks to cloud-based HPC: Overuse of resources.

“Cloud-based HPC is the fastest growing segment of high-performance computing … . The typical HPC cluster runs at nearly full capacity due to the rapidly increasing demands for continuous compute and storage cycles, with little room for additional workloads,” Lenovo said in its announcement of HPCaaS.

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Scott Tease, VP and GM of HPC at Lenovo, said that HPCaaS, alongside TruScale, will give HPC users flexibility often missing from cloud HPC without overly complicating things. “We designed this offering to make high-performance computing resources easier and faster to deploy, offering researchers the freedom to think bigger and without technology being a barrier to their success,” Tease said.

With TruScale HPCaaS, Lenovo said customers will only have to pay for what they use, scale clusters by removing resource limitations, run applications without architectural bottlenecks, eliminate budget approval delays, easily visualize consumption and billing and gain access to specialized hardware.

In addition, Lenovo said that HPCaaS offers improved security because TruScale HPC clusters operate without needing to be exposed to the public cloud or an outside network. Users retain total control of their data, and there aren’t any data ingress or egress charges associated with the service.

Why choose TruScale HPCaaS?

It’s worth noting that there are free alternatives to HPC cluster management, like the free, open-source OpenHPC designed to manage high-performance Linux machines. Why, if Lenovo’s HPCaaS service is just new software on top of existing hardware (the service is designed to run on existing Lenovo HPC clusters), would it be necessary?

“Existing offerings are not built from the ground up to service HPC customers and their unique needs; they are offshoots of existing enterprise offerings,” Tease said. 

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Tease said that Lenovo’s HPCaaS is less of a new interface for managing HPC clusters and more about giving HPC customers a way to augment the hardware in their data centers and avoid shortages and constraints that some of its customers have faced, like inability to access HPC resources when they’re critically needed. 

With HPCaaS, Lenovo hopes its customers will be able to more rapidly shift to meet unforeseen research needs and respond quickly to grant opportunities they may miss otherwise. And it’s not in the cloud, which is a plus for security, usability, and speed. 

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