Scaling Up

Expanding a cluster’s capabilities “vertically” by increasing the capabilities of existing components, but without adding more functional units at the node level as with scaling out. In both cloud and on-prem HPC, this means doing something like upgrading the CPU, RAM, or accelerator card capacity of existing resources, though the methods to do this are once again physical versus virtual. In general, cloud instances are more individually static than on-prem resources; while you may swap the CPU of an arbitrary on-prem compute node for a more powerful one or add more accelerator cards to it, these same operations in the cloud typically have to be accomplished by spinning up a larger instance template and transferring the existing workload onto it.