Unlocking HPC Cloud Transformation for Enterprises

Today I get to share something exciting – something that I believe will be a true enabler for the world of applied science and engineering.  
I joined Rescale in part because I strongly related to its mission to accelerate science and engineering innovation by transforming high performance computing (HPC). From battling pandemics, to addressing climate change, solving the world’s hardest science and engineering challenges require HPC. It’s also everywhere – HPC enables nearly every physical product we use today, from the safer cars we drive, to the advanced smartphones we use.
Given HPC’s pivotal role enabling businesses to commercialize new product innovations, it’s striking how slightly  this ~$40B market has changed in recent years. Only 20% of HPC workloads are in the cloud, compared to ~80% for general enterprise workloads. Today, all major cloud service providers (CSPs) offer specialized HPC infrastructures – great progress, but challenges remain.
The first challenge was turning raw cloud HPC infrastructure into turnkey simulation platforms that engineers find useful – something Rescale is really good at.  During my travels late last year to meet and listen to our customers, one comment stood out.  “Rescale, you guys make cloud tolerable,” said a highly experienced HPC practitioner.
He explained that in his previous job he managed fixed on-premises HPC infrastructures solving for high utilization.  But now he works at an engineering-driven company, where his primary responsibility is maximizing engineering throughput.  This meant using the cloud (which has the necessary scale and latest HPC architectures), providing a broad simulation software portfolio, staying on budget, and doing it all securely in a highly regulated industry.  According to him, without Rescale’s automation platform, cloud HPC expertise, and support, this simply would not have been possible. A win for their engineering team.  
But there’s another challenge that we need to tackle, and that’s helping engineering teams and enterprise IT work together.  Tension between IT and lines of business (LOBs) is an age-old problem not unique to HPC. IT is charged with an enterprise-wide security, reliability, and efficiency strategy, while LOBs pursue business outcomes. Until recently, most enterprise digital transformation efforts ignored engineering workloads.  But this is changing: HPC spend growth rate is twice that of overall IT, and business leaders are starting to pay attention. This is an unprecedented challenge for HPC service owners as the economics of HPC have been historically opaque.
As a former consultant serving business technology leaders, I’ve seen this movie before. In helping IT organizations improve their interactions with the business, the solution typically included four things: data-driven transparency, clear rules of engagement, a service catalog for the business to make cost/performance tradeoffs, and continuous improvement. It’s time to apply this discipline to HPC, particularly since cloud computing is an enterprise-wide CTO & CIO decision.
And so Rescale Insight was created, to deliver data-driven business management for HPC.
And we’re just getting started.  Today we also announced the industry’s first AI engine to match simulation workloads with the best architecture from our multi-cloud infrastructure library. We’re putting our eight years of cloud HPC experience into platform intelligence. Now in tech preview, Rescale’s coretype AI gives simulation engineers the best of AWS, Azure, and GCP without changing their workflow in any way.  All this happens within IT-defined policies on which cloud providers, price points, or pre-defined architectures are enabled. 
Rescale Insight provides enterprise IT transparency and control, while empowering engineering teams to drive new product innovations. Simply put, it is a bridge between enterprise IT and LOB engineering teams so that organizations can focus on why they do HPC in the first place:
To accelerate science and engineering breakthroughs.
To bring new product innovations to market.
To change the world.
So, today, I’m excited to finally share Rescale Insight, the new standard for enterprise HPC business management.