OmniSci is to deliver its accelerated analytics platform as a preloaded component on the HP Z4 and Z8 workstations. The deal enables data scientists and analytics teams to deal with massive datasets and complex analysis on their workstations. HP is claiming that customers buying a Z4 will break even when comparing costs to those of a cloud server implementation.
According to Jared Dame, Director of AI and Data Science, Z by HP: “We are dedicated to delivering the best user experience in all our solutions, including mobile and desktop workstations for professional creators and power users.
“OmniSci offers the advanced performance necessary to satisfy the new era in intensive data analytics, making it an ideal option for our Z8 workstations.”
A perfect marriage of hardware and software?
Cloud has enabled a significant shift in data science and analytics. One reason is the compute power it offers, including the number of cores, both CPU and GPU, along with large memory capabilities and data storage. The ability to increase and shrink that compute power allows organisations to quickly scale up when the data problem demands it or shrink when it doesn’t.
A workstation doesn’t have that flexibility, but that doesn’t mean it is compute poor. The HP Z8 has up to 56 cores, 3TB RAM and 2x NVIDIA Quadro RTX graphic cards. It can also support up to 48TB storage.
It is the preloading of OmniSci DB SQL database engine, and OmniSci Immerse data visualisation interface that makes this interesting. The software is capable of using all the cores and memory so that nothing is wasted. Where visualisation of complex analytics is required, for example, in computational fluid dynamics, this is a compelling match.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
This is a good deal for OmniSci. It will get their analytics engine in front of a much wider set of customers. HP also gains out of this by getting one of the fastest analytics platforms on its workstations. While cloud computing is growing in use for complex analytics, there is still a substantial market for on-premises solutions.
It remains to be seen how HP and OmniSci will work to get the software onto previous generations of the HP Z series workstations.
