HP Drags Intel Into HPC Market Push

HP and Intel are joining forces to spearhead a High Performance Computing (HPC) alliance that aims to make HPC more accessible to businesses.

The two companies have also opened a ‘Centre of Excellence’ that will harbour experts from the respective firms to help enterprises plan, develop and deploy HPC products.

“As data explodes in volume, velocity and variety, and the processing requirements to address business challenges become more sophisticated, the line between traditional and high performance computing is blurring,” said Bill Mannel, vice president of HPC and Big Data, HP Servers.

‘Data driven environment’

“With this alliance, we are giving customers access to the technologies and solutions as well as the intellectual property, portfolio services and engineering support needed to evolve their compute infrastructure to capitalise on a data driven environment.”

With the alliance, HP is now flogging its HPC Solutions Framework based on HP Apollo servers. These solutions will allegedly simplify the deployment of HPC systems for customers in oil and gas, life science and financial services. The HP Apollo product line integrates Intel’s technology from its HPC scalable system framework.

IDC forecasts that the base HPC compute server market will reach $15.2 billion (£9.8m) by 2019.

“Enterprises large and small are grappling with the growing challenges of increased model complexity and data sizes,” said Charles Wuischpard, vice president of Intel’s Data Centre Group.

“Intel’s HPC scalable system framework is a flexible blueprint for both computationally and data-intensive computing that provides optimised system performance at any scale – while maintaining reliability and ease of programming through open standards.  HP Apollo systems implementing the framework will be tailored to meet the stringent compute, I/O, memory and storage needs for HPC customers’ workloads.”