HP and Intel have entered into a High Performance Computing (HPC) alliance, announced today at the International Supercomputing Conference in Frankfurt, Germany.
The aim of the alliance is to address increasing HPC demand and to expand accessibility of HPC to enterprises of all sizes.
The first stage in increasing HPC accessibility will be the creation and launch of launch a new Center of Excellence (CoE) which will bring together HPC experts from both companies to support customers in planning, developing, deploying and managing HPC solutions.
The new CoE will open in Houston, Texas to better support the North American market. This centre will complement the CoE in Grenoble, France, which also has plans for expansion.
Both companies describe a ‘perfect storm of market dynamics’ accelerating the demand for enterprise HPC.
The key elements of this ‘perfect storm’ include the rise of new big data sources from mobility, cloud and the IoT; rapid transformation of business processes across key industries, such as oil exploration; and recent advancements in processing technology at a price-point that aligns with traditional general purpose IT.
The ‘perfect storm’ is fuelling a HPC market projected to be worth $15.2 billion by 2019, according to HPC server market forecasts by IDC.
"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 and general manager, HPC and Big Data, HP Servers.
"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 capitalize on a data driven environment."
As part of the alliance, HP will now offer its HPC Solutions Framework based on HP Apollo servers. These purpose-built HP Apollo Compute platforms will leverage next-generation Intel Xeon processors, the Intel Xeon Phi product family, Intel Omni-Path interconnect technology and the Intel Enterprise Edition of Lustre.