Amazon Web Services has announced a new managed service, AWS Parallel Computing Service (AWS PCS), which it hopes will improve companies’ access to high-performance computing (HPC).
The service is designed to give customers the ability to manage large, compute-intensive workloads and make life easier for system admins.
AWS PCS allows users to set up and manage clusters of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances using the open-source HPC workload manager Slurm scheduler.
AWS rolls out access to high-performance computing
Amazon hopes that AWS PCS will democratize access to high-performance computing, enabling smaller companies to benefit and preventing them from being left behind in the wake of larger enterprises.
Amazon Web Services said that its Parallel Computing Service is designed for both current and emerging workloads, be they computer- or data-intensive. Some examples include computational fluid dynamics, weather modeling, finite element analysis, electronic design automation, and reservoir simulations.
The service is available in multiple AWS Regions, including the US, Europe and Asia-Pacific, and it’s possible to reserve capacity in a specific Availability Zone.
As workloads intensify and companies start to handle more and more data, HPC-as-a-service represents a growing area of the market and one that AWS and key rivals, including Google and Microsoft, are looking to tap into.
In an interview with VentureBeat, Ian Colle, director of advanced compute and simulation at AWS, commented:
“There are a number of existing workloads today that really should be or could be taking advantage of high-performance computing resources, but because of the perception that it’s only for large enterprises or labs, whether real or perceived, is too much that people go, you know what, I don’t even want to go there.”
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