Oracle HPC Cloud Aims At Mainstream Business Data

ERP managers are finding more reasons to resort to high performance computing to improve the performance of big data analytics and machine learning models.

ERP systems have a huge amount of data that many companies are just beginning to use. To answer complex questions with this information, and to do it quickly, a lot of computing power is needed. It's one of the reasons why Oracle has just added a high-performance computing capability, or HPC, to the cloud to its portfolio of public cloud infrastructure services.

Oracle's new HPC cloud capability targets two audiences. The first is the users who run legacy HPC applications in their facilities, such as scientific projects, R & D applications and virtual product design instead of physical prototypes. The second audience is the ERP managers who need to apply high quality computing resources to the business data processed in the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure service.

ERP systems manage a large amount of data. "The majority of our customers today are trying to find more and more value from that data, and that is what we are seeing [as] growth," said Karan Batta, director of product management for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

HPC expands to the main commercial uses

The use of HPC outside of its scientific and traditional research use is expanding into areas such as sales analysis and planning, supply chain planning and workforce analysis related to human resources, said Steve Conway, Senior Vice President of Research at HPC Hyperion Research Research Firm in St. Paul, Minn.

An HPC system can absorb much more data to allow deeper analysis. This approach is also being combined with artificial intelligence technologies, such as an inference engine that can be applied to many situations in ERP, said Conway.

"The larger the data sets, the more accurate the results will be," he said.

Companies not only want questions related to ERP to be answered "that are more complicated than before, but they also want the answers in a time very close to the real," said Conway.

HPC ideal for machine learning models.

High performance computing is a set of technologies and processes designed to maximize performance. What Oracle HPC offers users is a clustered network with access to full processing, both CPU and GPU. Bare Metal is a single-tenant server or system that does not use virtualization, which can add latency.

Another key technology used by Oracle HPC to accelerate performance is remote remote access to memory (RDMA), which allows an application to write directly to memory remotely without involving the CPU or the operating system.

The use of bare metal and RDMA in a cloud platform means that providers are "overcoming one of the big bottlenecks that affected much of cloud computing, which is virtualization," said Conway.

Business application developers can take giant data sets from ERP systems and place this data in an automatic learning model. From that model, a company can find out what "type of information they can generate from that data" and then send it back to the ERP system, said Batta.

Batta said that machine learning models are computationally intensive and can take hours, days or even weeks to run if they do not have access to enough computing resources. That's where high-performance computing comes in.

Oracle's HPC system will scale up to 1,080 cores for a single project, although the number of cores available will be extended over time, Batta said.