In this video from the Dell EMC HPC Community Meeting, Josh Simons from VMware describes why more customers are moving their HPC & AI workloads to virtualized environments using vSphere.
“High Performance Computing (HPC) workloads are forecasted to be one of the fastest-growing workload types through 2020. With VMware, you can capture the benefits of virtualization for HPC workloads while delivering performance that is comparable to bare-metal. Our approach to virtualizing HPC adds a level of flexibility, operational efficiency, agility and security that cannot be achieved in bare-metal environments—enabling faster time to insights and discovery.”
In 2017, VMware introduced vSphere Scale-Out Edition for Big Data and HPC Workloads, a new solution in the vSphere product line aimed at Big Data and HPC workloads. VMware vSphere Scale-Out edition includes the features and functions most useful to Big Data and HPC workloads such as those provided by the core vSphere hypervisor and the vSphere Distributed Switch.
By virtualizing these workloads with vSphere Scale-Out, customers can benefit from:
- Dramatic Resource Optimization — Memory and CPU utilization optimization in a virtualized environment can increase performance significantly over a physical system. VMware tests of Big Data workloads have shown that virtualized Spark cluster performance can exceed physical cluster performance by up to 10 percent.
- Simplified Compute Node Creation — Adding more capacity to a Big Data cluster can be done by cloning VMs and giving them an identity. Clusters can be scaled up and down as needed.
- Network Flexibility — Widely distributed systems, like most Big Data clusters, require the management of many nodes using a common central point of control across the network, which vSphere delivers through the Distributed Switch.
Over the last decade and a half, virtualization has grown from a niche technology confined for use in test/dev environments to the de facto platform on which practically all enterprise data center workloads are run. It is also the foundation on which cloud computing is built. Better hardware utilization, reduced CapEx and OpEx, improved business agility, enhanced business continuity and security—these benefits are by now well understood and enjoyed widely.
The next Dell EMC HPC Community Meeting takes place June 24 in Frankfurt at ISC 2018.
