Leveraging high performance computing to help solve complex challenges across industries

In today’s competitive business landscape, having high compute power can be critical. Whether a bank needs to quickly conduct risk analyses to navigate volatile markets, the semiconductor industry needs to optimize chip design, or a life sciences company must carry out rapid and repetitive genome processing and sequencing to make their next breakthrough, high performance computing (HPC) can be key to solving large, complex problems in less time than with traditional computing methods.

As enterprises look to solve their most complex challenges, IBM Cloud® HPC is designed to bring an integrated solution across critical components of compute, network, storage and security, and it aims to help enterprises address regulatory and efficiency demands to clients. The solution also includes security and controls built into the platform and is designed to allow clients across industries to consume HPC as a fully managed service while helping them address third- and fourth-party risks.

In the world of financial services, having as much compute power as possible is important to help enable peak performance. As we see banks increasingly prioritize resiliency, performance, security and compliance, there are many external factors that can impact the financial services industry that they must be ready for. These can include situations that have the potential to significantly increase the computational capacity financial firms need on a daily basis. For example, competitive pressures, regulatory reporting, security demands and market swings can all require financial services institutions to be able to reassess risk quickly. To do this, they need to be able to perform complex calculations that require high levels of compute power.

To achieve the desired accuracy, models need the support of more data and the ability to perform more iterations and computations. This is where high performance computing (HPC)—which can deliver intensive compute power at scale—can be especially helpful. HPC is designed to deliver the performance levels these computationally intensive calculations require, whether located on-premises or in the cloud, and can help organizations address the demands of today’s evolving regulatory standards.

Now more than ever, we are also seeing financial institutions increasingly leverage HPC for capabilities like Monte Carlo simulations on market movements, including to power artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning solutions that can be used to help enterprises make more informed decisions. In the era of data and generative AI, HPC is key to processing data and generating insights quickly. With IBM Cloud HPC Managed Service, financial services institutions can benefit from customized deployment, ongoing platform support and app performance optimization management.

As customer expectations rise, it is necessary for companies to design at pace. The semiconductor space is no exception. In the last few years, we have seen just how essential semiconductors are to a variety of industries—including transportation and healthcare—and why it is so important that companies are able to develop these materials rapidly. As semiconductor manufacturers look to innovate quickly, electronic design automation (EDA) tools can be a key asset.

At the same time, with advances in design and complexity, significantly more compute is required. We are increasingly seeing organizations turn to cloud for this capacity, including hybrid cloud solutions that can help them more effectively manage peak workloads. IBM Cloud HPC is designed to deliver increased storage performance, greater compute power and higher levels of security in (or burst into) the cloud, and it can help EDA clients improve HPC for computational software workload performance and drive overall efficiency.

With the ability to flexibly manage compute-intensive workloads both on-premises and in the cloud with high levels of resiliency and performance, EDA leaders can take advantage of IBM Cloud HPC to address compute demand peaks while helping to mitigate the risk of downtime, which can benefit the enablement of strategic R&D work.

As the amount of data available in life sciences grows, so do the opportunities to make key discoveries that have the potential to make a real impact in people’s daily lives. Whether it’s biotechnology, pharmaceutical or genomics, it’s especially important for life sciences companies to deliver innovations as quickly as they can to help as many people as possible.

HPC can enable life sciences professionals to process data in near-real time and generate insights that have the potential to uncover new discoveries. With the flexibility and scalability of HPC, it is possible for life sciences companies to better manage diverse workloads and more accurately analyze their data to transform outcomes. As the world continues to face new health challenges, leveraging HPC in life sciences can help provide the necessary compute power to innovate on new breakthroughs, such as accelerating the development of new medicine.

We have seen HPC become a key aspect of the automotive industry and be used for a variety of functions, including for computational fluid design (CFD). CFD software is a helpful processing tool that can be leveraged by automotive engineers to analyze and solve challenges related to fluid flows. This includes simulating aerodynamics to reduce the drag and friction of air and enabling battery simulation to optimize the performance and safety of batteries. All of this can be done while helping to use less time and resources than traditional physical testing. Since CFD simulations can be very large, they require intensive compute power that running on HPC can deliver—especially if results are needed in a timely fashion.

At the same time, the automotive industry is also preparing for the challenges of tomorrow. With the rise of autonomous vehicles and intelligent features, the need and ability to analyze large volumes of data is growing exponentially. The power of HPC can enable automotive manufacturers to gain insights more quickly, which has the potential to help them innovate faster as they work to deliver products that are safer, more reliable and efficient. HPC can accelerate the end-to-end design and development process, all the way from helping automotive engineers optimize fuel consumption to improving driver safety with the help of advanced simulations and data analysis.

As industries of all kinds strive to remain competitive, IBM Cloud HPC is designed to help them analyze data, perform complex calculations, run intensive simulations and more—quickly. By bringing IBM’s longstanding experience in workload management and scheduling with IBM LSF® and IBM Symphony® together with IBM Cloud HPC in a hybrid cloud environment, we aim to help clients across industries—including financial services, semiconductor, life sciences and aerospace and automotive—take advantage of automation that helps to optimize HPC jobs and enable them to realize faster time to value, enhance performance and minimize cost.

Additionally, when coupled with the IBM Storage Scale storage solution, IBM Cloud HPC can offer a single, globally integrated solution designed to help users easily manage and cost-effectively move data across hybrid environments to execute HPC workloads in real-time.