The SC15 exhibition hosted 343 companies from across the world ➤
customers had felt that, ‘when the box was only available from IBM it was overpriced and over-engineered’. Now that it is opened up, he said, Penguin can offer other form factors, and be more nimble and closer to customer requirements. Ultimately, Penguin’s customers are
interested in solving end-user application problems and Pokorny pointed out that in high-performance computing there are a lot of very closely coupled codes. For this class of problems, he went on, even InfiniBand is not fast enough – and that was one of the reasons that Penguin found the Powed technology interesting. It could offer two to three times as much memory bandwidth compared to Intel, and so would boost performance by attacking a real bottleneck, he said. ‘Intel needs the competition’, he continued,
‘this is part of our motivation for exploring other technologies.’ It was a matter of ‘spreading our eggs’ rather than having them all in one basket. ‘Tis makes us a better partner for our customers,’ he said. He stressed that for an integrator such as Penguin, the unifying thread was the Linux operating system. ‘We specialise in Linux. We only have to train our support staff in one system – Linux.’
Convergence of HPC and Big Data Gupta sees the OpenPower initiative as an addition to, not a change from, IBM’s existing Power server line, which is widely used in commercial and business computing by airlines, ATMS, and back office systems in major companies. OpenPower will allow people to explore the higher end of computing in a way that was not possible before, because it goes aſter sectors that have a lot of data – HPC; Big Data; and the Cloud. In this sector, clients will not just be
buying a Power system, he explained, but the promise of a whole ecosystem that is now being created – that will deliver applications that will allow them to achieve their
20 SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD
objectives. In the past, he said, IBM could not pursue Big Data with its Unix product line: ‘But now we can because of the partnerships in OpenPower. It can’t just be IBM. Clients have to believe in the ecosystem.’ Cray’s Barry Bolding also sees convergence
between HPC and Big Data. However, because Cray is tightly focused on the high- end of supercomputing, he believes that the company can offer solutions where it can
CLIENTS HAVE TO BELIEVE IN THE ECOSYSTEM
bring traditional simulation and analytics together. He cited the way in which, in oil and gas for example, Ethernet used to be king in previous years but now that will fade out in favour of low-latency communications, he believes, and so the Ethernet cluster will be in decline.
Market chaos in HPC? Bolding sees greater fragmentation in the industry than simply the Power/non-Power split. He cited the risk that customers who seek the security of a long-term relationship with their vendor may see recent developments almost as ‘market chaos’. IBM has off-loaded its x86 business to Lenovo; HP has split itself into two businesses; in October, Dell spent $67 billion on the largest- ever acquisition in the technology industry, buying EMC, the world’s largest provider of data storage systems. As a consequence of such developments, these companies’ focus on high-end computing (whether HPC or Big Data) may well be diluted. Unsurprisingly for a senior Cray
executive, Bolding sees such developments as reinforcing his own company’s standing in the market. As reported in Scientific Computing World’s website in June, Cray is only interested in customers who want high- end computing (and also, in this age of Big
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Data, in those who want advanced analytics). Tose who have problems that could best be solved on commodity hardware should, in effect, look elsewhere. Because of this single- minded focus on the high end: ‘People can be certain about Cray,’ he concluded. Cray and IBM are very different
companies, of different sizes and with different interests; so not unnaturally, IBM sees things in a different light. Its philosophy, according to Gupta, is, so to speak, to have Power as the centre of ten million or so servers sold every year, but not necessarily to expect that all the ten million servers will be made by IBM. ‘We want to capture as much of the market as we can, so we need partners such as Penguin,’ he said. In many ways, these divergences and
different directions are a sign of a healthy and vigorous industry. Tree years ago, there was an almost tangible air of depression at the US Supercomputing conference and exhibition. Te turn-around started last year, with the announcement of the first procurements in the Coral project to build next-generation supercomputers at two of the US Department of Energy’s national laboratories (the third announcement followed some months later.) Tis year, the upbeat mood has continued, with clear optimism about the future on all sides. l
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