[mscman]

Cloud HPC Solutions Architect here. In this use case, cloud computing wouldn't really suffice. For a company who needs 24x7 access to compute power of that scale, they really will benefit from buying a standalone system like this.

While some cloud providers now have very high-speed, low-latency interconnects, they only scale so wide in a virtual environment. This is due to limitations in the physical datacenter space and the way node provisioning works on the back-end. If you truly need extremely wide, low-latency, high bandwidth interconnect for a large period of time, on-prem is still (probably) your best option.