Specialized Supercomputing Cloud Turns Eye to Machine Learning

Back in 2010, when the term "cloud computing" was still laden with peril and mystery for many users in enterprise and high performance computing, HPC cloud startup, Nimbix, stepped out to tackle that perceived risk for some of the most challenging, latency-sensitive applications. At the time, there were only a handful of small companies catering to the needs of high performance computing applications and those that existed were developing clever middleware to hook into AWS infrastructure. There were a few companies offering true "HPC as a service" (distinct datacenters designed to fit such workloads that could be accessed via a web interface or APIs) but many of those have gone relatively quiet over the last couple of years. When Nimbix got its start, the possibilities of running HPC workloads in the cloud was the subject of great debate in the academic-dominated scientific computing realm. As mentioned above, concerns about latency in the performance-conscious realm of these applications loomed large, as did the more general concerns about the cost of moving data, the remote hardware capability for running demanding jobs, and the availability of notoriously expensive licenses from HPC ISVs.