high-performance computing
➤ high end of high-performance computing,’ says Scott Misage, vice president and general manager, high-performance computing, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. ‘According to industry analyst IDC, the low end of the HPC market has been out-pacing the high end for a couple of years now, and both of them are growing faster than generalised IT.’ ‘Te high end of high-performance
computing is largely driven by the public sector, and that is typically highly cyclical. But there are certainly small businesses, whether start-up or mature, that want to capitalise their high-performance computing environments – and they are buying smaller systems,’ says HPE’s Misage. Some large firms are also establishing
small, ad-hoc HPC installations, even when they have existing, larger HPC infrastructures alongside their enterprise systems. A firm that is carrying out a separate, secret R&D project, or a secret joint venture project with business partners, may establish a separate small-scale HPC installation in their own offices, sometimes off-site. Tis will be isolated from both the main HPC infrastructure and the company’s enterprise systems in order to maintain secrecy over the project. According to Nigel Gore, head of product
management at British HPC specialist Iceotope, many of the systems they provide are for companies that are engaging in product or market developments that they want to keep secret. Iceotope packs HPC systems into water-cooled units, producing systems that are designed to go unnoticed into any normal office or workplace, without requiring any special power systems or air conditioning. Te company claims its systems could even be installed into a boardroom. A small HPC cluster can, therefore, be added easily to any normal workspace without the need for adaptation.
Cloud driving adoption of on-site HPC Cloud implementations of HPC from the likes of AWS, Google, or Microsoſt, can be seen as an alternative to small or mid-scale industry-standard HPC systems. For some smaller and mid-sized companies, public cloud HPC can replace the need for their own local on-site HPC installations. But for some companies – big and small – public cloud HPC is accelerating the adoption of smaller on-site HPC clusters at departmental or work-group level. Rather than replace on-site HPC, public cloud HPC is combining with smaller on-site HPC into a new cloud- local HPC model.
6 SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING WORLD Tis new model can be called ‘hybrid
burst-out’ HPC. According to Bart Mellenbergh, director, HPC and big data at Dell EMC EMEA, ‘some companies will reach a point where they have both a cloud- like HPC environment and a small local HPC installation. You can start with only one HPC server, and then you burst out to the cloud to do the computations that you need.’ Smaller, simple to manage HPC systems
on-site supply a work-group with continual access to medium range compute HPC performance, together with data intensive
THIS SPREAD OF HPC INTO THE COMMERCIAL SPACE IS CHANGING THE CULTURE, AND SKILLS MIX AMONG HPC USERS
pre-processing and post-processing, data-set munging, selection and other data-related operations. When extremely intense compute performance is required, the local on-site HPC system automatically transfers those tasks to a public HPC cloud instance to compute, and then retrieves the result – completing processing locally. By processing the highly compute-
intensive task in a cloud HPC instance, but carrying out all other compute and data handling tasks locally, the hybrid burst-out approach creates a highly cost-effective and agile model for smaller firms and work-groups to implement HPC for either scientific or alternative uses.
For many types of workload for which
firms would consider HPC, public cloud HPC may not be suitable. Smaller on-site local HPC may be much better suited. ‘Movement of significant amounts of data
from on-site to off-site is so expensive and so cumbersome that it makes it difficult to move to the public cloud,’ says Lenovo’s Scott Tease. However, Tease sees great potential in the development of private HPC clouds. For Dell’s Bart Mellenbergh, cloud-based
HPC can make sense, based on workload requirements: ‘If you need continuous access to HPC compute, it doesn’t make economic sense to site HPC in the cloud. But if you’re only using it rarely, then it can make sense.’ According to HPE’s Scott Misage, this
ability to mix and match different platform models for HPC requirements, depending on workload, makes smaller scale HPC far more cost-effective than before, and is fuelling a surge in market growth. ‘Around five per cent of the low-end of
the market are consuming HPC from the cloud,’ says Misage. ‘But there’s a 30 per cent compound annual growth rate, which is very fast compared to the mainstream HPC market, which analysts say is growing at around eight per cent annually.’ It’s worth pointing out that, according
to the latest Gartner estimates, the overall global IT market is growing at between -0.5 and 0.0 per cent. PC shipments are reckoned to have fallen by seven per cent.
Enabling individualised medicine Industries that are adopting smaller sized HPC systems include finance – one of the pioneers in embracing industry-standard HPC – manufacturing, construction,
www.scientific-computing.com
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