HPC marketplaces for more efficient industrial products
“The potential benefits are huge. HPC centres will obtain new revenue streams, cloud service providers will be able to develop new markets, and large enterprises will benefit from hybrid HPC.”
Outstanding HPC technology is at our doors. Yet, its complexity has so far made it very difficult for those in need of all this computing power, such as industry players and scientists, to exploit its full potential. With HEROES, project coordinator Philippe Bricard and other partners want to remove obstacles standing in the way of these users. They have been working on a software solution that can be used to submit complex simulation and machine learning workflows to HPC data centres and cloud infrastructures. “HEROES is a framework to create what we call marketplaces,” explains Bricard, CEO and founder of HPC solution provider UCit. “We are working on a decision module able to select the most appropriate platform for the users’ specific artificial intelligence or machine learning workflow, based on the strategies they define. Users just need to log in, select an application workflow and define their placement strategy.” These criteria include, for example, best performance, best price to performance ratio, lowest cost, best eco-responsibility and best energy to performance ratio. The project team will specifically focus on the workflow requirements of the renewable energy and manufacturing industries, to help them develop more energy-efficient products (such as energy-efficient vehicles). Ultimately, the software and its marketplaces could be used by large companies to build their own HPC infrastructure, by service providers to build multicloud or multicluster HPC platforms, or by universities and research labs looking for resources to distribute their application codes and workflows. “The potential benefits of HEROES are huge. We can apply the platform to different contexts and requirements of different types of users. HPC centres will obtain new revenue streams, cloud service providers will be able to develop new markets, and large enterprises will benefit from hybrid HPC,” says Bricard. “Our goal when the project ends is to proceed to direct sales or licensing to help clients building their own HPC marketplaces. We also see a real opportunity in designing and operating a service that would allow us to bring EuroHPC resources to the European research community or to SMEs.”
Keywords
HEROES, HPC, High Performance Computing, Supercomputer, technologies, digital sovereignty, quantum computing, innovation, green computing, energy-efficient, skills, SMEs