f11photo/
Shutterstock.com
High-performance computing Opens up
The mood was upbeat at SC15, where Tom Wilkie found the supercomputing industry going Open but also splitting up
B
ehind the flurry of announcements about new products and the winning of prestigious contracts, one basic truth about the supercomputing
industry emerged at SC15, the US supercomputing conference in Austin, Texas, at the end of November: high-performance computing is now too big for any one company. In some ways this is a reflection of a
second development in supercomputing: that this is the age of acceleration. As Nvidia proudly announced at SC15, more than 100 accelerated systems are now on the list of the world’s 500 most powerful supercomputers, published at the beginning of the conference, some 70 of them using Tesla GPUs – representing a compound annual growth of nearly 50 per cent over the past five years. IBM, in turn, announced new offerings centred ‘on the tight integration of IBM’s Power processors with accelerators’. Te diversity of hardware that now has to
be deployed to keep improving performance – and the sheer scale of the massively parallel machines being built and envisaged for the near future – means that there is no standard architecture and no standard way to program them. One other salient feature of SC15 was the way in which FPGAs are now coming into the limelight, in a manner markedly similar to the advent of GPUs some eight years ago. To be successful in high-performance
computing (HPC) today, it is no longer enough to sell good hardware: vendors need to develop an ‘ecosystem’ in which other hardware companies use their products and components; in which system administrators are familiar with their processors and architectures; and in which developers are trained and eager to write code both for the efficient use of the system and for end-user applications. No one company, not even Intel or IBM, can achieve all of this by itself anymore.
18 SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD @scwmagazine l
www.scientific-computing.com
OpenHPC project Two announcements on the eve of the conference crystallised these developments. Firstly, Te Linux Foundation has set up an OpenHPC Collaborative Project to provide a new, open source framework to develop soſtware for high-performance computing. Among the commercial members are Cray, Intel, Lenovo, Dell and HP (or Hewlett Packard Enterprise, as it is now called). Secondly, IBM also made major
announcements both about expansion of the work of its OpenPower network, and about a close tie-up between IBM and FPGA
maker Xilinx. In an interview with Scientific Computing World at SC15, IBM’s Sumit Gupta was explicit about the need for many companies to contribute their specialisms and expertise to high performance computing: ‘Te key message is that it is an unrealistic expectation that one company can build the best technology across the board. Our core strategy is that we don’t believe one company can build the best accelerator, the best network, etc. Market dynamics are important to sustain the industry over the long term.’ With the establishment of the OpenHPC Project, it begins to look as if the high-
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40