HPC Comes To Main Street as High Productivity Computing
I particularly savor it when our friends on the analyst and editorial sides of the industry agree with us at BLADE that advanced data center technologies such as blade servers and10 Gigabit Ethernet are ready to bring the high productivity of High Performance Computing (HPC) to the mainstream enterprise.
Debra Goldfarb and Michael Feldman at Tabor Research and its media outlet HPCwire.com, are spot on in the realization that what we know as high performance computing on Wall Street, science and academia is coming to Main Street, will be known as High Productivity Computing. That stands to reason, especially in today's frugal economy.
As Michael astutely observed a while back , the lines between traditional HPC and Main Street computing are increasingly blurred. Today, server OEMs can build commodity-based blade server and rack-level systems with all the characteristics associated with HPC and sell their wares into a vast range of markets -- financial, entertainment, oil & gas, biotechnology, manufacturing, and others. The same holds true for HPC storage and network component vendors, such as BLADE's own bladed and top-of-rack data center-class switches.
We BLADErs agree with Debra and Michael that HPC coming to Main Street sounds like good news -- and it is even if it creates some initial confusion in the industry. We applaud their evangelism of the term "High Productivity Computing" instead of "High Performance Computing" to describe the new Main Street HPC.
Debra correctly asserts that due to the democratization of HPC, the market is rapidly maturing. Instead of being focused on flops or even flops/dollar, users -- practical creatures that they are -- are demanding return on investment (ROI). So rather than fixating only on the server hardware, the environment must be looked at from what a holistic perspective that includes the network and storage interconnects, the storage hardware, servers, applications et al.
This view of High Productivity Computing for Main Street is dependent upon the balanced integration of all system and subsystem-level components. And, as Debra rightfully concludes, this notion of productivity is aligned with ROI, which is what BLADE's approach to Rackonomics is all about, and which you can read about in detail in my earlier postings.
While the conventional HPC industry will still look to the Top500 list for the fastest computers on the planet, Main Street is looking to get their HPC work done and is simply interested in getting the most computing bang for the least amount of bucks. And that’s what BLADE and our partners such as HP, IBM, NEC and now Verari Systems, are all about.
We'd be delighted to have you visit BLADE at Supercomputing '08, booth 322, 17-20 November, in Austin, Texas. BLADE's VP of Product Strategy and Management, Dan Tuchler, will be giving a talk on 10G Ethernet "Ready for Major Breakthrough in HPC Environments in 2009", on Wednesday, 18 November at 10:30am.
Debra Goldfarb and Michael Feldman at Tabor Research and its media outlet HPCwire.com, are spot on in the realization that what we know as high performance computing on Wall Street, science and academia is coming to Main Street, will be known as High Productivity Computing. That stands to reason, especially in today's frugal economy.
As Michael astutely observed a while back , the lines between traditional HPC and Main Street computing are increasingly blurred. Today, server OEMs can build commodity-based blade server and rack-level systems with all the characteristics associated with HPC and sell their wares into a vast range of markets -- financial, entertainment, oil & gas, biotechnology, manufacturing, and others. The same holds true for HPC storage and network component vendors, such as BLADE's own bladed and top-of-rack data center-class switches.
We BLADErs agree with Debra and Michael that HPC coming to Main Street sounds like good news -- and it is even if it creates some initial confusion in the industry. We applaud their evangelism of the term "High Productivity Computing" instead of "High Performance Computing" to describe the new Main Street HPC.
Debra correctly asserts that due to the democratization of HPC, the market is rapidly maturing. Instead of being focused on flops or even flops/dollar, users -- practical creatures that they are -- are demanding return on investment (ROI). So rather than fixating only on the server hardware, the environment must be looked at from what a holistic perspective that includes the network and storage interconnects, the storage hardware, servers, applications et al.
This view of High Productivity Computing for Main Street is dependent upon the balanced integration of all system and subsystem-level components. And, as Debra rightfully concludes, this notion of productivity is aligned with ROI, which is what BLADE's approach to Rackonomics is all about, and which you can read about in detail in my earlier postings.
While the conventional HPC industry will still look to the Top500 list for the fastest computers on the planet, Main Street is looking to get their HPC work done and is simply interested in getting the most computing bang for the least amount of bucks. And that’s what BLADE and our partners such as HP, IBM, NEC and now Verari Systems, are all about.
We'd be delighted to have you visit BLADE at Supercomputing '08, booth 322, 17-20 November, in Austin, Texas. BLADE's VP of Product Strategy and Management, Dan Tuchler, will be giving a talk on 10G Ethernet "Ready for Major Breakthrough in HPC Environments in 2009", on Wednesday, 18 November at 10:30am.
Labels: Rackonomics RackSwitch BLADE Network Technologies Vikram Mehta
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