CPU-Only Compute Still Matters To A Lot Of HPC Centers
The Next Platform, Monday, February 23rd, 2026
It has taken three decades for HPC to move to the cloud, and the truth is that a lot of simulation and modeling applications are still coded to run on CPUs.
The good news is that the major clouds and some of the smaller ones have tuned up their CPU estates with fast networking and proper HPC software stacks so they can be of good use for HPC centers that, for whatever reason or another, desire to rent rather than to buy some compute capacity.
This week, Amazon Web Services trotted out the latest of its HPC-tuned virtual servers, the HPC8a instances, which are based on a customized versions of AMD's 'Turin' Epyc 9005 series processors. The Turin CPUs.