High-Performance Computing (HPC) has long been an incredible accelerant in the race to discover and develop novel drugs and therapies for both new and well-known diseases. And a HPC migration to the Cloud might be your next step to maintain or grow your organization’s competitive advantage.
Whether it’s a full HPC migration to the Cloud or a uniquely architected hybrid approach, evolving your HPC ecosystem to the Cloud brings critical advantages and benefits including:
- Flexibility and scalability
- Optimized costs
- Enhanced security
- Compliance
- Backup, recovery, and failover
- Simplified management and monitoring
And with incredibly careful planning, strategic design, effective implementation and with the right support, the capabilities and accelerated outcomes of migrating your HPC systems to the Cloud can lead to truly accelerated breakthroughs and drug discovery.
But with this level of promise and performance, comes challenges and caveats that require strategic consideration throughout all phases of your supercomputing and HPC development, migration and management.
So, before you commence your HPC Migration from on-premise data centers or traditional HPC clusters to the Cloud, here are some key considerations to keep in mind throughout your planning phase.
1. Assess & Understand Your Legacy HPC Environment
Building a comprehensive migration plan and strategy from inception is necessary for optimization and sustainable outcomes. A proper assessment includes an evaluation of the current state of your legacy hardware, software, and the data resources available for use, as well as the system’s capabilities, reliability, scalability, and flexibility, prioritizing security and maintenance of the system.
Gaining a deep and thorough understanding of your current infrastructure and computing environment will help identify technical constraints or bottlenecks that exist, and inform the order that might be necessary for migration. And that level of insight can streamline and circumvent major, arguably avoidable, hurdles that your organization might face.
2. Determine the Right Cloud Provider and Tooling
Determining the right HPC Cloud provider for your organization can be a complex process, but an irrefutable critical one. In fact, your entire computing environment depends on it. It involves researching the available options, comparing features and services, and evaluating cost, reputation and performance.
Amazon Web Service, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud – to name just the three biggest – offer storage and Cloud computing services that drive accelerated innovation for companies by offering fast networking and virtually unlimited infrastructure to store and manage massive data sets the computing power required to analyze it. Ultimately, many vendors offer different types of cloud infrastructure that run large, complex simulations and deep learning workloads in the cloud, and it is important to first select the one that best meets the needs of your unique HPC workloads between public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud infrastructure.
3. Plan for the Right Design & Deployment
In order to effectively plan for a HPC Migration in the Cloud, it is important to clearly define the objectives, determine the requirements and constraints, identify the expected outcomes, and a timeline for the project.
From a more technical perspective, it is important to consider the application’s specific requirements and the inherent capabilities including storage requirements, memory capacity, and other components that may be needed to run the application. If a workload requires a particular operating system, for example, then it should be chosen accordingly.
Finally, it is important to understand the networking and security requirements of the application before working through the design, and definitely the deployment phase, of your HPC Migration.
The HPC Migration Journey Begins Here…
By properly considering all of these factors, it is possible to effectively plan for your organization’s HPC migration and its ability to leverage the power of supercomputing in drug discovery.
Assuming your plan is comprehensive, effective and sustainable, implementing your HPC migration plan is ultimately still a massive undertaking, particularly for research IT teams likely already overstretched or for an existing Bio-IT vendor lacking specialized knowledge and skills.
So, if your team is ready to take the leap and begin your HPC migration, get in touch with our team today.
The Next Phase of Your HPC Migration in the Cloud
A HPC migration to the Cloud can be an incredibly complex process, but with strategic planning and design, effective implementation and with the right support, your team will be well on their way to sustainable success. Click below and get in touch with our team to learn more about our comprehensive HPC Migration services that support all phases of your HPC migration journey, regardless of which stage you are in.