Debunking the Top 3 Common Myths About HPC and AI

High-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) are everywhere. In fact, they're an ideal, one-two punch for organizations committed to remaining competitive in the real-time, data-driven business world of today.

But many IT and business leaders hold firm to common beliefs about HPC and AI myths that are usually outdated and sometimes inaccurate that prevent adoption and put business innovation at risk. Here, we debunk the top common myths to help decision-makers make stronger, more informed decisions.

Myth 1: Only governments and academia use HPC and AI. Plus, it's too expensive.

Data is the power behind any organization's growth, regardless of industry or size. It helps to make better decisions, predict trends, and provide better services. But at the breakneck pace by which it's growing the amount of data generated every day is expected to reach 463 exabytes globally by 2025 (1), and the dominance of IoT may inflate this estimate further gaining real-time business value from data is challenging without the intelligence of AI solutions and the HPC infrastructure behind them to accelerate time to insight.

For these reasons, HPC and AI use cases have expanded outside the realms of academia and government to help all industries capitalize on their data. Using HPC and AI technology combined, financial services institutions can fight fraud and mitigate risks, semiconductor manufacturers can boost quality and efficiency, airliners can coordinate their flight routes to save on fuel costs, and healthcare and life sciences organizations can reduce the time needed to develop new drugs, and more (2).

For those intimidated by the high price tag that's not a myth: advanced scale and speed will cost you there are ways around huge, lumpsum investments in HPC infrastructure. For example, HPE GreenLake for HPC is delivered through a pay-per-use model that provides cost transparency and built-in buffer capacity to handle unexpected spikes in demand and steady business growth. With HPE GreenLake for HPC, customers can access industry-leading HPC solutions, such as HPE Cray, HPE Ezmeral and HPE Apollo.

Myth 2: HPC and AI solutions require more human resources and expertise to manage and maintain them.

Yes, managing and maintaining HPC systems introduces far more complexity than keeping desktop and laptop fleets up and running. But a number of specialist vendors offer managed services to reduce the challenges associated with time and cost, freeing up IT resources to tackle tasks that drive business outcomes. 

HPE GreenLake for HPC can help manage HPC environments, with HPE experts conducting performance tuning, capacity planning, patch management and more, all while monitoring top KPIs like uptime, time to resolution and ticket status. HPE GreenLake Central also provides a self-service control panel that helps users monitor costs, security, and compliance, while allowing developers and business users to locate and consume the services they need (3).

Determined AI is a powerful and robust software stack that can train AI models faster, at any scale, using its open-source machine learning (ML) platform. HPE combines Determined AI's unique software solution with its AI and HPC offerings, enabling users to easily implement and train AI and ML models to provide faster and more accurate insights from their data.

Myth 3: HPC and AI are separate technology domains that can't or shouldn't coexist.

This may have been the way these technologies started each with its own sets of specialized hardware, software, and operational models (4). But think back to the first myth debunked: If organizations want to foster business growth and gain market share, then they need to make their data actionable and they need to do it quickly. 

Without access to the computational power of HPC combined with AI technologies to handle data's massive scale and distinct processing challenges, businesses will not only struggle to use their data for the good of themselves and their customers, but they'll stumble when reaching for a competitive advantage.

We work with key technologies and partners to better enable customers to quickly leverage HPC and AI solutions. We can help show the art of the possible through our Advanced Technology Center, where you can evaluate, design and realize their benefits. Contact us today to learn how.

(1) Seed Scientific, "How Much Data Is Created Every Day? +27 Staggering Stats," October 2021.

(2) Fortune, "High-performance computing has become crucial to competitive advantage—in every industry," December 2021.

(3) TechTarget, "What Is HPE GreenLake and How Does It Work?" July 2020.

(4) CIO, "Is Artificial Intelligence Just Another High Performance Computing Workload?" August 2020.