Agnostiq offers commercial version of Covalent Cloud for managing HPC, quantum resources
Aqnostiq, Toronto start-up that describes itself as a distributed computing firm, announced the commercial release of its Covalent Cloud, which supports managed, on-demand, and serverless high-performance computing (HPC) and quantum computing resources in a highly abstracted and simplified platform, Agnostic said.
The company added that the platform allows users to use Python to access advanced computing resources without being experts in the complex underlying hardware infrastructure or operations, thereby simplifying their ability to prototype, build, and scale computationally heavy applications for optimization, simulation, machine learning, and quantum computing in a cost-effective and user-friendly way.
Agnostiq CEO Oktay Goktas, who will be speaking at IQT Canada next month, commented in an email exchange with IQT News that Covalent Cloud is not intended to be a challenge to the major cloud-based quantum computing services. “It is the unification of all of these services (these services can be used from Covalent Cloud), where one can scale classical HPC resources with one line of code,” Goktas said. “In all other platforms to date, scaling HPC requires an expert understanding of underlying infrastructure. It is ultimately an on-demand serverless HPC and quantum computing platform.”
In this way it helps users who need the advantages of advanced computing quickly, perhaps for competitive business reasons, but otherwise spend an inordinate amount of time and money setting up and managing infrastructure.
Specifically, the platform:
- Offers a unified interface for all of the customers’ computing resources, whether they are on-premises or in private or public clouds, making it easy for end users to take advantage of different advanced computing paradigms, such as QPUs, CPUs, and GPUs in an efficient and cost-effective way;
- Enables customers to iterate across hardware types by swapping out compute resources seamlessly, without disrupting the end-user workflow; and
- Helps customers migrate from on-premises HPC to cloud-based HPC by bridging different compute modalities together in an intuitive and straightforward manner
“As market trends promote distributed and heterogeneous computing, software developers can be confident that Covalent Cloud will remain a simple interface to an increasingly diverse and complex hardware landscape. At the same time, hardware vendors can integrate with Covalent Cloud to immediately open their platforms to a global user base,” stated Dr. Will Cunningham, Head of High Performance Computing at Agnostiq.
The commercial release of Covalent Cloud initially is being made available to a limited number of users before being released for general availability. It follows the earlier unveiling of Covalent Cloud as an open source service.
Agnostiq announced last month that it had raised $6.1 million in extension seed funding, and Goktas had said at that point that some of the new funds would go toward the development of the company’s commercial platform.
Dan O’Shea has covered telecommunications and related topics including semiconductors, sensors, retail systems, digital payments and quantum computing/technology for over 25 years.
