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Red Hat Enterprise Linux for HPC slated for availability in the Azure Marketplace in Q1, 2025.

High performance computing with Red Hat

Organizations are increasingly using high performance computing (HPC) to solve their most pressing problems with data-driven decisions. The desire to use artificial intelligence (AI) at scale places new demands on existing HPC architectures. These new workloads require the capabilities of HPC to expand further, shifting away from traditional bare metal deployments toward hybrid cloud application platforms.

As a result, these high performance computing solutions can now be deployed on-premise, at the edge, or even in the cloud.

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What is high performance computing?

High performance computing (HPC) refers to processing complex calculations at high speeds across multiple servers in parallel. Those groups of servers are known as clusters and are composed of hundreds or even thousands of compute servers that have been connected through a network.

High Performance Computing (HPC) with Red Hat

High performance computing use cases

The use cases for high performance computing have grown to include AI/ML and expanded across industries but, until recently, there have been few changes to the architecture of HPC. The orchestration of containers across hybrid cloud environments enables new architectures to address these expanded use cases. Red Hat’s approach to high performance computing focuses on 3 categories. 

Linux® is the dominant operating system for high performance computing, according to the TOP500 list that keeps track of world’s most powerful computer systems. All TOP500 supercomputers run Linux and many of the top supercomputers run Red Hat® Enterprise Linux.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the most popular operating system across all HPC sites, including some of the top supercomputers in the world.

Dr. Earl Joseph
Chief Executive Officer, Hyperion

Researchers in a wide variety of fields, including fundamental science research, weather and climate research, and defense research, use high performance computing to evaluate and draw conclusions from large amounts of data. HPC clusters aid in modeling and simulation as well as advanced analytics.


Historically located in government and university research facilities, high performance computing is expanding from traditional data center architectures to the hybrid cloud.

High performance computing provides advantages to industrial and enterprise users in a variety of industries, including:

Companies are using high performance computing clusters to support technical computing efforts in design and predictive modeling in science and finance. 

The Red Hat high performance computing portfolio

The Red Hat portfolio of high performance computing products brings the familiarity and power of our enterprise open source platforms to high performance computing workloads.

An OS that delivers a consistent, flexible foundation built to run high performance workloads. That’s why Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the operating system platform for El Capitan, the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) first exascale supercomputer. 

A modern application platform that provides a trusted, comprehensive, and consistent experience, fostering organizational and IT innovation through its security-first, scalable application development and delivery capabilities.

An infrastructure management product designed to keep Red Hat Enterprise Linux running efficiently.

An open, massively scalable, simplified storage solution for modern data pipelines.

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