Demand for scalable, high-performance computing (HPC) is greater than ever. Organizations are seeking power for data-intensive use cases — from scientific simulations and AI model training to complex data analytics. Yet, it can be challenging to adopt or scale HPC due to technical, operational, or financial constraints.
Now there’s an easier way to scale into the cloud for HPC, thanks to Google Cloud H4D virtual machines (VMs) running on AMD’s 5th Gen EPYC processors. This VM series enables cloud-based infrastructure on demand, and delivers compute resources, high bandwidth, and ultra-fast networking with the needed elasticity for cost-effectiveness. The 5th Gen AMD EPYC processors also power Google Cloud’s C4D VMs for balanced general-purpose and AI workloads.
H4D empowers IT teams to provide responsive, reliable services aligned with business objectives, while fulfilling mission-critical needs, such as these use cases:
- Scientific research: Accelerates complex models like weather forecasting, genomics analysis, and physics simulations, helping researchers gain faster insights
- Artificial intelligence: Offers the computational horsepower needed to train large-scale machine learning models with efficiency and speed
- Financial services: Enables rapid risk analysis and modeling, thanks to H4D’s precision and scalability
- Media and entertainment: Provides high-performance VMs for rendering and visual effects production, both of which demand high throughput and low latency, whether handling batch processing or interactive workloads
Overcome persistent HPC management issues
Implementing HPC at enterprise scale often brings challenges that can slow innovation and inflate costs:
- Traditional HPC environments are costly and complex, requiring infrastructure investments that often sit underutilized during non-peak periods. Inefficient use of resources drives up expenses, making it difficult to balance performance goals with budget realities.
- Managing complex configurations of HPC hardware, specialized clusters, and networking can soak up significant IT expertise and overhead.
- On-premises HPC systems may not have the power or capabilities to scale quickly, causing businesses to overprovision capacity or face delays due to lengthy procurement cycles.
- Inconsistent performance and unpredictable latency further undermine mission-critical HPC workloads, while stringent security and compliance requirements add layers of complexity and risk.
Google Cloud’s H4D instances are purpose-built to overcome these obstacles and deliver measurable business value. By combining AMD’s 5th Generation EPYC processors (code-named Turin) with Google’s Titanium platform, H4D offers a cloud-native HPC environment that simplifies infrastructure management and accelerates time to insight for organizations that are cloud-only or need to scale into cloud HPC capacity.
Titanium is a specialized hardware and infrastructure layer integrated into Google Cloud’s managed compute services. It offloads critical infrastructure functions — including networking, storage, and security — to free up CPU resources and run HPC workloads faster and more efficiently. Using cloud remote direct memory access (RDMA), H4D provides low latency and 200 Gb network bandwidth for multi-node HPC clusters. You can also use the Google Cloud Cluster Director platform to simplify management of H4D clusters.
These capabilities combine for improved throughput and consistent performance across compute-intensive tasks. Reliable, high-frequency compute power ensures performance for AI training, simulations, and data analytics. With H4D’s technical advances and Google Cloud’s new Dynamic Workload Scheduler, IT teams can scale compute resources dynamically to precisely match capacity to workload demands while avoiding costly overprovisioning.
Dedicated HPC power
H4D offers whole-node performance exceeding 12,000 GFLOPS (giga floating-point operations per second) and memory bandwidth surpassing 950 Gb per second, giving enterprises extraordinary computing power. The VMs deliver the highest per-core performance available in Google’s portfolio, ensuring demanding workloads run efficiently and at scale.
They are also designed to provide dedicated, high-performance computing power by offering one virtual processor for each physical core, with access to all 192 cores in a server to ensure maximum processing capacity and efficiency for demanding workloads.
H4D is enhanced by AMD’s Zen 5 architecture, which delivers significant improvements in instructions per cycle, power efficiency, memory bandwidth, and overall compute performance — making these VMs ideal for both general-purpose and AI inference workloads in the cloud.
With H4D, IT and business leaders can confidently harness HPC to drive innovation, improve operational efficiency, and unlock new growth opportunities without compromise.
Read more about H4D VMs here, including what customers are already saying about them.