We are thrilled to announce the release of Red Hat OpenShift for High Performance Computing (HPC) on the IBM Cloud.

This solution will help you set up an end-to-end HPC system for containerized applications by using automated scripts from the public git repository.

Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud is a leading platform for developers to quickly and securely containerize and deploy enterprise workloads in Kubernetes clusters. Since IBM manages the OpenShift Container Platform (OCP) you’ll have more time to focus on your key tasks.

The main differentiators include the following:

• Automate multizone deployments with failure recovery.
• Scale across IBM’s global footprint of data centers and multi-zone regions.
• Consistently monitor, log and secure your applications.
• Use Vulnerability Advisor to enforce and check the security status of container images.
• Automated node management and scaling based on workload needs.
• Utilize the as-a-service option to provide automated provisioning, configuration, upgrades, patch management, performance tuning and 24/7 global SRE support.

IBM already offers IBM Spectrum LSF Suites, IBM Spectrum Symphony and Slurm Workload Manager on the Cloud, and Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud will be the fourth platform to deploy HPC applications. Red Hat OpenShift is IBM’s strategic direction from the Red Hat acquisition and the key capabilities of the offering are as follows:

• Use open-source, Terraform-based automation to provision HPC clusters in minutes.
• Choose from three interface options: UI with IBM Cloud Schematics, API and CLI with automation code from public GitHub repository.
• Use the Kubernetes scheduler for managing and submitting jobs on cluster nodes.

Get started with Red Hat OpenShift HPC on IBM Cloud.

IBM delivers HPC value and experience

Key industries spanning automotive, aerospace, electronics, life sciences, financial sector, oil and gas, energy and utilities are running compute-intensive workloads. Fifty-five percent of the United States GDP of around $10 trillion is touched by HPC for industrial design, weather prediction, genomic research, vehicle crash simulation and drug discovery. Serverless computing, analytics, big data, Hadoop and machine learning are other workloads that lend themselves well to HPC.

Red Hat Open Shift as a managed service on the IBM Cloud will benefit clients with large computational containerized workloads. Understanding the nature of the workload (be it high throughput or parallel) is key, and IBM has been working with clients on HPC algorithm development and architecture design for the past 25 years to improve infrastructure utilization.

Why high performance computing on the cloud?

Clients’ HPC problems are typically solved by a vendor that provides an integrated solution out of the box, with compute instances, workload schedulers, storage management and high-speed data transfer. Buying these products across a varied set of vendors increases the risk of deployment and support considerably. Customers are looking for one vendor, consolidated billing and a single point of support. The process should be fully automated by inputting the appropriate configuration parameters, resulting in automatic provisioning of clusters and installation of all required software. This is a huge differentiator over the current way of doing things, and the setup can be completed in hours — and not days — dramatically improving time to market.

Clients may also like to operate in a hybrid mode, which means running static or steady state jobs on-premises and dynamic or burst jobs on the cloud, which any offering must support with full automation. With Red Hat OpenShift clients have the ability to integrate the IBM Cloud Paks, data, AI and multicloud into their containerized HPC applications. 

The cloud offering should charge only for the capacity a client uses, so it is a true utility-based model. It should also support worldwide multi-zone regions, the highest level of encryption and security, disaster recovery and high availability capabilities. The cloud provides instantaneous capacity to satisfy HPC peak loads, eliminating the lengthy wait times so clients can perform multiple iterations of their simulations to achieve best possible results.

Learn more

We encourage you to bring your applications to us and we will help guide you on the best approach.

• Watch this five-minute YouTube video for more information on why to use HPC on the IBM Cloud.
• Read the High Performance Computing Solution Brief.
• Get started with Red Hat OpenShift HPC on IBM Cloud.