Red Hat’s David Egts: Open Source, Hybrid Cloud Could Provide Agencies Access to Supercomputing

David Egts, chief technologist of North American public sector at Red Hat, has said federal agencies seeking to gain access to high performance computing should leverage open source and hybrid cloud platforms.

Egts wrote in a GCN article published Wednesday that open-source software powers supercomputers like Summit and Sierra and noted how cloud supports HPC workloads.

“Open-source technologies have also informed and been used in cloud technology stacks, allowing CPU resources to be scaled out,” he said.

“In fact, HPC workloads no longer need to run on bare-metal hardware. These workloads can often be deployed in the cloud using software containers that are easier to provision, access, orchestrate and scale as needed.”

Egts discussed how HPC could benefit the Department of Housing and Urban Development, U.S. Strategic Command and the National Institutes of Health and cited how a hybrid cloud strategy could help agencies advance HPC adoption.

“Using a hybrid cloud strategy, agencies can experiment quickly on a small scale with lower risk, and then bring those workloads on-premises to scale out the solution. … The key is to build HPC solutions on an open substrate that enables these workloads to go from physical to virtual to cloud and back again as business needs and technologies change,” he noted.