HPC Cloud Updates WE 05 Oct 2025
Updates to AWS, Azure & GCP in the last week relevant for HPC practitioners. Amazon makes some updates to PCS and its similarly named cousin. Google takes a shot at Microsoft and Microsoft gives show how to use Active Directory for cloud HPC.
AWS
This is about EDA and using Synopsys but the architecture looks very familiar and not dissimilar to what is often done in financial services for cloud bursting too.
PCS now allows updates without having to rebuild the cluster, additional Slurm configuration possibilities and allows nodes to be rebooted via Slurm. That’s a few nice changes… did I miss a blog rolling all this together and talking about it? Feels like someone at AWS would have done that? Ah yes, Matthew did but only in a LinkedIn post and only two of the announcements it seems
Brendan (boof) is back with Tech Shorts. Life sciences on Graviton this time
Parallel Cluster Service (you know the other thing that sounds like the PCS above but isn’t) gives you the ability to use a couple of new instance types
EC2 Auto Scaling supports IPv6 now
Azure
AIM is always painful when integrating cloud capability. If you already use EntraID (the thing the rest of us call Active Directory) then maybe it just got a little bit easier… well if you’re prepared to use Azure Linux (sigh… yes I know) anyway
trcooper
NetApp on Azure gets a bit more Flexible
Google Cloud
It’s hard to ignore the fact this is published by one of Microsoft’s competitors but even so it’s you can’t argue that much of what is stated here isn’t true. If you happen to want to run HPC on Windows Server, then the licensing model really does mean Azure is the only price competitive game in town.
