Conclusion

AWS has a long history of helping customers from various industries — including financial services — to optimize their HPC workloads. This experience over many years from customers with diverse requirements has directly contributed to the products and services offered today, and will continue to do so. AWS regularly accommodates very large-scale requests for Amazon EC2 instances. Some of these clusters are large enough to be recognized among the world’s largest supercomputers, scaling to millions of vCPUs in support of batch processing.

HPC platforms are crucial enablers for many different types of financial services organizations including capital markets, insurance, banking and payments. However, as demands on these platforms increase as a result of regulatory requirements it’s clear that the traditional approaches to provisioning HPC infrastructure are inefficient and ultimately unsustainable. Constraints on capital and capital expenditure further compound the challenge.

By migrating these systems to AWS, customers benefit from a wide variety of compute instances and relevant services, but also from a fundamental change in the delivery of compute capacity. This new approach offers tremendous flexibility, both in terms of the management of workloads that vary day-to-day, but also in the overall approach to cost optimizations, security, availability, and operations.

HPC workloads already have much in common with stateless, function-as-a-service architectural patterns. Just as financial services moved from local calculations to clusters and into grids, they are starting to explore decentralized, serverless approaches. As scaling become transparent, bottlenecks will continue to be removed until processing becomes near real-time. This trend is explored further in the blog post The Convergent Evolution of Grid Computing in Financial Services

If you have challenges with the scale, cost, and capacity challenges of managing a high performance computing system today, AWS has a number of services and partner relationships that can help.

To learn more, you can contact AWS Financial Services through the AWS Financial Services – Contact Sales form.