High-Performance Computing
Secure or Not Secure – That is the Question
Various security tools and features have been made available to Cloud end users over the past few years. They are designed to allow the application of security best practices on a Cloud infrastructure, similar to how it is with an on-premise data centre. Yet many skeptics’ have questions around security in the Cloud, for example: … Read more
Industry Consolidation and the path to Exascale
The HPC industry saw continued consolidation throughout 2019 and the gene pool of HPC companies continues to steadily shrink, with the trend likely to carry on in 2020. What this will mean for the industry will depend on which side of the fence you sit? If you are a supplier, then a merger or acquisition … Read more
Forecast: Cloudy with a chance…
I recently joined Red Oak Consulting with a background in Enterprise IT. In the world of Enterprise IT, the arguments about whether or not to move to the cloud are all but over and organisations building new Enterprise IT solutions in 2019 are doing so in the cloud. The world of HPC with its higher … Read more
Financial Modelling in HPC
Collectively at Red Oak Consulting we have been working on TCO models for clients for decades. As a result of our work and experience within TCO modelling we have created a highly evolved model for TCO analysis, which drills down into all of the deep dark recesses of whole life cost modelling for HPC and … Read more
Key Early Questions When Running a Proof of Concept in The Cloud
When we’re approached by a customer to perform or support a Cloud Proof of Concept (PoC), regardless of its conceptual state, we have a number of key steps and initial questions in mind. The most obvious is to state the exact problem which needs to be solved. Since any proof of concept is almost always … Read more
Collaboration & Competition in HPC
The business of buying, selling and managing high-performance computing resources is for the most part an amicable one. Aside from the periodic low-grade spat between Mellanox and Intel over the benchmarking of their respective interconnects, we see little evidence of vendors bad-mouthing each other. On the customer front, when a relationship with a vendor breaks … Read more
How the Cloud is Falling Short
The last couple of years have seen cloud computing gradually build some legitimacy within the HPC world, but still the industry lies far behind enterprise IT in its willingness to outsource computational power. The most often touted reason for this is cost – but such a simple description hides a series of more interesting causes … Read more
Do cryptocurrencies have a part to play in HPC?
It’s easy to be distracted by news from the US, China, and now the EU on the state of various exascale projects, but behind the vinyl-wrapped cabinets and well-groomed sales execs are an army of Excel-wielding PMO and accountancy staff trying desperately to keep projects on-time and on-budget. Applying the same level of scrutiny once … Read more
What’s in Store for HPC in 2018
Here, we Look ahead to 2018 – and specifically what the future has in store for some of the major HPC suppliers… Ready Player One The widely-praised Ryzen CPU release saw AMD re-enter the consumer CPU market as a strong competitor to Intel, and perhaps even the front-runner where cost optimisation is a more important … Read more
