AWS Launches Parallel Computing Service to Accelerate Scientific Discovery and Innovation

AWS Parallel Computing Service is Now Generally Available, Designed to Accelerate Scientific Discovery

New service allows customers who build scientific and engineering models to quickly and easily set up and manage high performance computing infrastructure to accelerate R&D at scale Marvel Fusion, Maxar, RONIN, and The National Renewable Energy Laboratory among the first customers and partners to use AWS Parallel Computing Service Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company (NASDAQ: AMZN), today announced the general availability of AWS Parallel Computing Service, a new managed service that helps customers easily set up and manage high performance computing (HPC) clusters so they can run scientific and engineering workloads at virtually any scale on AWS. The service makes it easy for system administrators to build clusters using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, low-latency networking, and storage optimized for HPC workloads. With AWS Parallel Computing Service, scientists and engineers can quickly scale simulations to validate models and designs, while system administrators and integrators can build and maintain HPC clusters on AWS using Slurm, the most popular open-source HPC workload manager. This service accelerates innovation in areas such as fast-tracking drug discovery, uncovering genomic insights, building engineering designs, running weather applications, and building scientific and engineering models. To get started with AWS Parallel Computing Service, visit https://aws.amazon.com/pcs/. AWS has a history of innovation in supporting HPC workloads. That history includes releases like the open source cluster orchestration toolkit AWS ParallelCluster, fully managed batch computing service AWS Batch, low latency network interconnect Elastic Fabric Adapter, Amazon FSx for Lustre high performance storage, and dedicated AMD, Intel, and Graviton-based HPC compute instances, the latter delivering up to 65% better price-performance over comparable compute optimized x86-based instances. Thousands of customers from a wide range of industries have migrated their HPC workloads to AWS to fast-track drug discovery, uncover genomic insights, maximize energy resources, and spin up supercomputers with millions of cores. Today AWS continues our innovation in HPC by releasing a fully-managed and comprehensive HPC service, which removes the undifferentiated heavy lifting of creating and managing HPC clusters. AWS Parallel Computing Service is a new managed service that helps customers easily set up and manage HPC so they can run scientific and engineering workloads at virtually any scale on AWS. With AWS Parallel Computing Service, system administrators can use familiar tools including AWS Management Console, CLI, and SDK to deploy a managed Slurm environment. AWS Parallel Computing Service builds from open-source foundations that customers know and have experience with, and delivers a managed Slurm experience with the reliability and availability of AWS. AWS Parallel Computing Service significantly reduces the operational burden of managing a cluster and regularly delivers new capabilities and fixes through managed service updates with minimal to no downtime, eliminating the need to apply manual patches and rebuilding clusters to receive feature updates. Highly available APIs also help developers and ISVs create end-to-end HPC solutions on top of AWS, so they can focus on providing value-added features to their users and customers instead of worrying about managing infrastructure. AWS Parallel Computing Service enables customers of all sizes (e.g., startups, enterprises, or national labs) to easily create and manage HPC clusters with the scalability, reliability, and security of AWS. This means scientists and engineers using Slurm can easily migrate their existing on-premises workflows to AWS without re-architecting them -- giving scientists and engineers access to cloud infrastructure that scales automatically. And administrators who want to unblock capacity or capability constraints for their end-users can spin up clusters in just minutes instead of months, to run their simulations to address the world's most challenging problems. "Developing a cure for a catastrophic disease, designing novel materials, advancing renewable energy, and revolutionizing transportation are problems that we just can't afford to have waiting in a queue," said Ian Colle, director, advanced compute and simulation at AWS. "Managing HPC workloads, particularly the most complex and challenging extreme-scale workloads, is extraordinarily difficult. Our aim is that every scientist and engineer using AWS Parallel Computing Service, regardless of organization size, is the most productive person in their field because they have the same top-tier HPC capabilities as large enterprises to solve the world's toughest challenges, any time they need to, and at any scale." To get started, system administrators use the AWS Management Console to spin up a Slurm cluster securely and execute jobs in just a few clicks, compared to manual orchestration today. With CloudFormation support coming soon, customers will be able to build and deploy HPC clusters using infrastructure as code. AWS Parallel Computing Service is now available in the following Regions: US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Frankfurt), Europe (Stockholm), Europe (Ireland), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Tokyo). Marvel Fusion is a Germany-based fusion energy startup pursuing the creation of unlimited zero-emission energy. "We are excited that AWS Parallel Computing Service will deliver highly available and easy-to-upgrade HPC cluster management capabilities," said Moritz von der Linden, CEO of Marvel Fusion. "It will empower our scientists and IT staff to take advantage of the latest AWS Parallel Computing Service capabilities in hours, instead of the weeks of planning and overhead previously needed." Maxar Intelligence provides secure, precise geospatial intelligence, enabling government and commercial customers to monitor, understand, and navigate our changing planet. "As a long-time user of AWS HPC solutions, we were excited to test the service-driven approach from AWS Parallel Computing Service," said Travis Hartman, director of Weather and Climate at Maxar Intelligence. "We found great potential for AWS Parallel Computing Service to bring better cluster visibility, compute provisioning, and service integration to Maxar Intelligence's WeatherDesk platform, which would enable the team to make their time-sensitive HPC clusters more resilient and easier to manage." RONIN is an Australia-based software company whose flagship HPC service provides a simple, intuitive web interface for researchers and scientists from leading academic and research institutions to easily run HPC simulations on AWS. "Democratizing HPC in the cloud by simplifying the user experience for researchers is our key mission," said Nathan Albrighton, CEO and founder of RONIN. "The introduction of AWS Parallel Computing Service greatly simplifies our ability to build and operate HPC environments using APIs and elevates the HPC capabilities we offer to our customers." The U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) is a leading institution focused on research, innovation, and strategic partnerships to deliver solutions for a clean energy economy. "The pursuit of scientific discovery comes with significant overhead associated with maintaining high performance computing infrastructure," said Michael Bartlett, cloud architect in the Advance Computing Operations Group at NREL. "AWS Parallel Computing Service has the potential to improve our research efficiency by reducing this overhead with its automated update and observability management features. In particular, new capabilities for automatic scaling and handling high-throughput computing tasks will allow us to efficiently process large datasets and complex simulations, ensuring that our scientists can prioritize solving high-priority problems." About Amazon Web Services Since 2006, Amazon Web Services has been the world's most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud. AWS has been continually expanding its services to support virtually any workload, and it now has more than 240 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, media, and application development, deployment, and management from 108 Availability Zones within 34 geographic regions, with announced plans for 18 more Availability Zones and six more AWS Regions in Mexico, New Zealand, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, Thailand, and the AWS European Sovereign Cloud. Millions of customers -- including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies -- trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com. About Amazon Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Amazon strives to be Earth's Most Customer-Centric Company, Earth's Best Employer, and Earth's Safest Place to Work. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Career Choice, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, Alexa, Just Walk Out technology, Amazon Studios, and The Climate Pledge are some of the things pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.

AWS's new HPC-as-a-service offering democratizes supercomputer access

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Amazon's cloud service AWS wants to democratize access to high-performance computing (HPC) for enterprises through its new managed services product, AWS Parallel Computing Service. AWS Parallel Computing lets AWS customers access computer servers for large, compute-intensive workloads without the need to train systems administrators. Ian Colle, director of advanced compute and simulation at AWS, told VentureBeat this kind of access may accelerate the pace of innovation for technology or scientific discovery that traditionally rely on access to HPC clusters. "There are a number of existing workloads today that really should be or could be taking advantage of high-performance computing resources, but because of the perception that it's only for large enterprises or labs, whether real or perceived, is too much that people go, you know what, I don't even want to go there," Colle said. However, Colle thinks that will change once companies realize they can use HPC clusters more easily with the new service, enabling more experimentation. "We're reducing the administrative burden and thinking of making a capital procurement commitment in at least the six to seven-figure range for an HPC cluster. But now all I need is an AWS account, and I can do experiments, wondering if this workload could benefit to fan out to a thousand nodes, let me try that," he said. What does the service offer AWS Parallel Computing lets users set up and manage groups of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud instances. The company tapped open-source HPC workload manager Slurm to build and maintain the clusters for system administrators. The company already offers customers access to HPC clusters, but the previous iteration required companies to provide their own system administrators and other professionals to maintain the network. Customers who want to run scientific and engineering workloads at scale can use the same tools on AWS, such as the Management Console and software development kits. Since the service uses Slurm, users can migrate any existing workflows to the AWS HPC cluster without rearchitecting anything. Enterprises can also connect any APIs. Colle said AWS's offering "simplifies cluster administration and unlike other products, customers can completely offload Slum management" to the service. The service will first be available in AWS regions in Ohio, Northern Virginia and Oregon in the United States; Frankfurt, Stockholm and Ireland in Europe; and Sydney, Singapore and Tokyo in Asia-Pacific. Colle said some AWS customers got access to Parallel Computing early to show the breadth of use cases HPC clusters can do. Companies like Germany-based Marvel Fusion use the service for their research around unlimited zero-emissions energy. Australian company Ronin, which is working to run HPC simulations on the cloud, runs its environments on the service. Why there's demand for HPC clusters Providing access to HPC clusters gained traction in the past few years as companies began needing access to compute power to train large language models and other AI foundation models. More and more, HPC networks target not just large calculations needed for drug discoveries but also for AI workloads. It used to be that large government labs were researching big scientific discoveries, and very big companies had access to supercomputers. Hardware manufacturers like AMD, Intel, Nvidia and IBM competed to create faster and ever more powerful supercomputers for government and scientific clients. With more companies interested in using HPC clusters, "HPC-as-a-service" has grown thanks to cloud providers like AWS, Google, Microsoft Azure and Penguin Computing on Demand, which offer access to these powerful servers to clients.