Hut 8
HPC Infrastructure to Power the Future

James Beer, SVP of Operations

Hut 8 is a frontrunner in offering a customized suite of products for both cloud and hybrid environments and bridging the gap between traditional and nascent forms of HPC. Its enterprise-grade cloud computing platform comes with high-density computing and memory capabilities, allowing clients to quickly and cost-effectively scale their operations.

“We are on the bleeding edge of innovation, delivering custom and scalable infrastructure that supports growth and the client’s changing business requirements,” says James Beer, SVP of operations. “It powers and supports the growing needs of our digital asset, gaming, and AI customers.”

Small and midsize businesses (SMB) and enterprises in countries like Canada often don't have many options when it comes to large-scale computing. The big players don't offer personalized services or custom options for HPC infrastructure. Unlike them, Hut 8 supports the requirements of its clients by providing flexibility in services and data center choices. It allows companies to leverage its next-generation computing, storage, and network services while delivering 24/7 monitoring and connectivity. Its high-quality services come with a hundred percent uptime guarantee, with cloud services having a 99.99 percent service-level agreement.

Ensuring the Highest Level of Security and Reliability

Hut 8 has five data centers with over 36,000 square feet of space in prime locations such as British Columbia and Ontario, enabling it to meet the needs of its clients across Canada. The infrastructure, servers, network, and storage are fully hardened per industry standards to protect customer data. It adheres to more than a hundred operational controls, which are audited by a third party to ensure security. It is SOC 2, type 2-certified and has numerous encryption mechanisms with around-the-clock alarms and monitoring of all core systems.

Various techniques are used to ensure a robust security architecture, including centralized authentication, multi-factor authentication, and segmentation.

To further protect businesses from data loss and downtime, Hut 8 has fully optimized disaster recovery, managed backup, and archival storage solutions. Its robust storage layer operates on flash storage platforms to provide quick and on-demand access to data.

It also has a GPU-based platform catering to the dense computing needs of clients in VFX, 3D gaming, AI, and machine learning. Hut 8 supports clients by partnering with them on short-term, flexible, high-demand computing projects; traditional data center providers simply don’t offer the same service.

We are on the bleeding edge of innovation, delivering custom and scalable infrastructure that supports growth and the client’s changing business requirements

The backbone of Hut 8 is its team that works in unison with customers to drive innovation and technology advancements. Its executive team has a century of collective experience in the data center space, and its support team encompasses skilled staff that goes above and beyond the call of duty to assist clients in addressing their challenges. Clients are brought into the innovation process, able to test the solution in its infrastructure and suggest necessary changes for improvement. A continual learning ethos program enables the team to understand issues in-depth and formulate a solution that benefits current and future client requirements.

A combination of storage virtualization and security experience allows Hut 8 to resolve client issues quickly. In one instance, a multinational ERP provider used its solutions to power their accounting and inventory management software. Hut 8 efficiently addressed their requirement for a scalable and robust platform with high availability and uptime.

Similarly, many clients leverage Hut 8’s range of products and solutions to drive their business and digital goals. As an example, Hut 8 was able to help a stealth-mode venture-stage 3D generative AI company by providing high quality and scale GPUs for them to successfully train their AI model and create high-quality 3D assets.

“We're proud of our first operational year of the HPC business and look forward to innovating and working with emerging technology,” says Beer.

Hut 8’s focus on innovation encourages it to simultaneously run multiple proofs-of-concept for testing new functionality of products. It focuses on collaborative and continuous learning, working with partners, original equipment manufacturers, and quality assurance departments on the vendor side to help them solve systems integration challenges. While these collaborations provide Hut 8 with great experiences, partners get a platform to deploy, grow, and flourish their technologies in new, nascent markets.

For example, leveraging Hut 8 as a trusted partner, Zenlayer, an IT service company offering on-demand bare metal servers, edge computing, and colocation and hosting services, recently expanded its footprint to Canada. The partnership enabled Zenlayer to launch a new cloud in Canada's east and west regions, including Toronto and Kelowna, providing customers across the country with lower latency, next-generation computing hardware and an enhanced customer experience.

”We are energized about the promises of emerging technology, and as AI continues to grow exponentially, we are well-positioned to use our expertise and our unique, flexible computing infrastructure to support the high-demand loads of these clients”

Anticipating the growth in workloads, Hut 8 plans to expand and build more data centers in its current markets while exploring new ones in the U.S. It is also architecting a national network to provide a 100 gigabit backbone across the country. This will help clients achieve high performance and low latency, giving customers faster access and better performance.

Hut 8 looks forward to deploying rentable GPUs in its private cloud fabrics in the existing data centers for clients to easily leverage AI-related computing services. It is also developing a platform that will allow clients to request computing storage and network resources in an automated fashion. It can be easily and instantly deployed without having to wait days or weeks.

Hut 8 remains committed to enhancing its automation and security features to ensure clients have maximum availability, compliance, and security for their future needs.