IBM high performance computing (HPC) available thru SoftLayer cloud

Enterprise IT vendor IBM said high performance computing (HPC) will be available through the cloud.

As part of the initiative, IBM said InfiniBand networking technology to connect SoftLayer bare metal servers will be available on SoftLayer cloud platform – enabling high data throughput speeds between systems. The main benefit is that the initiative will be allowing companies to move workloads associated with HPC, such as oil and exploration and data analytics to the cloud.

InfiniBand networking architecture delivers high transfer speeds — up to 56Gbps — between compute nodes. This new HPC option enables low latency between bare metal servers and private clusters of servers with up to hundreds of compute nodes, said IBM.

IBM will be targeting  life sciences and genomics, computer aided engineering, financial services, electronics design and reservoir simulation segments. These segments can reduce latency between bare metal servers in these private clusters customers to manage massive amounts of data faster, said IBM in a statement.

The introduction on InfiniBand on SoftLayer will especially benefit customers who are leveraging fully supported, ready-to-run clusters complete with code name IBM Elastic Storage, IBM Platform LSF or Platform Symphony workload management.

InfiniBand will be available on SoftLayer through the IBM Platform Computing team, expected in the third quarter of 2014.