Since releasing Alces Flight into public cloud in 2016 we have witnessed firsthand the evolution of HPC from a specialised field to a more diverse and inclusive arena. With the acceptance of public cloud as a real and feasible solution, students, academics and corporates are beginning to push ever-more compute-intensive workloads cloudwards. No longer a HPC curiosity, 2018 will see more projects taking on public cloud as a solution to cover some, or even all, of their needs.
As the demand for cloud resource grows, the team at Alces Flight have been working towards not only meeting the near-term aims of our customer base but also to the future. This future, termed “hybrid HPC,” encompasses combinations of hardware, cloud, and even multi-cloud platforms. With a dizzying array of options open to buyers and users alike, we understand that creating a consistent environment is pivotal to easing this transition. With such a potential for unstructured growth in this new world of HPC, our mission is to provide a predictable environment for users to work in, no matter what platform they choose.
This is why, from today, we are adding capability for those interested in harnessing cloud HPC to subscribe, for free, to our OSS Edition of Alces Flight Compute through the Azure Marketplace. With this launch even more users are able to access our single-user, fully-featured HPC environment, complete with job scheduler and over a thousand applications, all ready to go within minutes.
Azure Marketplace will host two versions of our OSS Edition. The first is Alces Flight Compute, Cluster Edition which steps you through the process of creating a whole cluster and allows you to define the composition of your cluster, including the capability to create login and compute nodes which vary in type, size, network capability and storage capacity.
Your Azure portal dashboard can help you keep track of the resources created, making it easy to bring new clusters online or close projects down in a few simple steps.
Our second offering, Alces Flight Compute, allows for more tailored requirements by providing a building block that allows you to craft your own custom login node together with any mixture of virtual machines to create a cluster.
We’re looking forward to welcoming more users aboard Alces Flight and continuing to bring you more innovation in HPC end user environments this year. Feel free to read the official press release, watch or download documentation on our tool, or join our subscription list to keep up-to-date on what is next for Alces Flight.