High Performance Computing

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

When we’re approached by a customer to perform or support a cloud proof of concept, 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 (PoC) is almost always … Read more

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

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

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

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

HPC, or High Performance Computing, is, somewhat reassuringly, exactly what it sounds like. Computers are, at their core, machines that we use to solve problems. They can range in size and simplicity from that of a pocket calculator, to a smartphone, to a desktop, all the way up to behemoths that take up entire warehouses, … Read more

The next time you are at one of the industry’s get-togethers try asking your colleagues if they have delivered any projects on time/budget recently. When they assure you that their projects are always delivered on time and to budget probe a bit deeper (possibly involving beer!), “Was that the timetable/budget initially agreed with the sponsor/budget … Read more