Justifying Your Cloud Investment: High-Performance Computing (HPC)

It's one thing to say infrastructure and operations (I&O) professionals need to invest in infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud computing for their high-performance computing (HPC) workloads. It's quite another to justify the financial and resource commitments. This requires a business case that validates the investment on grounds of business empowerment, cost savings, or faster time-to-market. Positive return on investment (ROI) from HPC cloud computing can't be achieved as a blanket business case because the benefits vary based on application design and use case. Cloud economics now makes HPC attainable for firms that couldn't afford such efforts before, and less costly, more expandable, and with a faster time-to-value for those that already could. This report examines the benefits and use cases for deploying HPC workloads in an IaaS cloud computing environment.