Intel and Google are developing high-performance computing (HPC) forward on Google Cloud with the release of the Cloud HPC Toolkit.
It provides access to tools from the Intel oneAPI Base and HPC Toolkits through Intel Select Solutions for Simulations & Modelling. These tools improve compile times, speed of results and offer multi-vendor acceleration in SYCL.
“Using Cloud HPC Toolkit with an Intel Select Solutions for Simulations & Modelling blueprint brings the added benefit of automatically spinning up a hardware-software configuration that has been rigorously tested and optimised for real-world performance, eliminating guesswork,” Ilias Katsardis, HPC solution lead, Google.
Why It Matters
Intel supports an open ecosystem to further industry-wide innovation. Enterprises and research organisations are eager to adopt cloud computing to expand computing capacity and access the latest technologies for large, complex projects. Despite the desire to set up robust HPC environments in the cloud, many face challenges with overcoming unfamiliar concepts and tools. As a result, demanding workloads and applications are slow to deploy, encounter software incompatibilities and showcase subpar performance.
Intel Select Solutions for Simulations & Modelling also provides access to tools including the Intel MPI Library and Intel oneAPI Math Kernel Library via the Spack package manager, popular software delivery and build platform. The culmination of work between Intel and Google helps make HPC more seamless and turnkey for users in this community.
The integrated Intel oneAPI tools support the open standards HPC developers need including C++, SYCL, Fortran, OpenMP, MPI and Python. They deliver productive cross-architecture performance across CPUs and GPUs using a single codebase.
The Cloud HPC Toolkit with Intel Select Solutions was developed using 2nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors. It enables users to simplify the configuration and deployment of HPC workloads and optimise for real-world performance. Intel’s ongoing collaboration with Google supports these projects, delivering more automated, user-friendly and compatible solutions that enable users to quickly meet increasing performance demands.
How Intel and Google Built on Previous Success
In August 2021, Intel announced a collaboration with Google that utilised Google’s HPC VM image and the Intel Select Solutions for Simulation & Modelling specification to automate the creation of Intel Select Solution-compliant HPC clusters on Google Cloud. Prior to that, Google worked with Intel to extend the capabilities of its CentOS-based VM image for HPC with the Intel HPC Platform specification, which made Intel’s software optimisations for Intel Xeon Scalable processors easily available to user applications running on Google Cloud.
What’s Next
Intel is extending open programming solutions into cloud environments to help drive innovation across the industry and the adoption of new HPC CPU and GPU architectures as they become available. As demand for high-performance storage grows in HPC, so does the need for Distributed Asynchronous Object Storage (DAOS). As the foundation of the Intel exascale storage stack, DAOS is an open source software-defined scale-out object store that provides high-bandwidth, low-latency and high I/O operations per second storage containers to HPC applications. With this announcement, capabilities for DAOS are now hosted in the Cloud HPC Toolkit for a fully automated user experience.
