3 March 2008
by Simon Quicke
The increasing amount of data swilling around company servers and desktops plus demands to use it to take decisions is shifting the goal posts of the high-performance computing (HPC) market.
Analysts predict an increase in revenue from the HPC market and resellers have pointed to the software development community as a key constituency that needs to support the market.
Julian Fielden, managing director of OCF, said there had been some middleware written for the market but there were still a number of ISVs that still had not properly engaged with what were primarily open source-based systems.
"Linux has matured and most companies are risk-adverse and, as the support infrastructure has developed, the industry has understood and more ISVs have bowed to the inevitable and produced for Linux," he said.
David Kirk, NVIDIA chief scientist, said there would be a tipping point in the market as people realised CPU-based solutions no longer doubled performance each 12 months.
"The greatest challenge to software developers is the move from serial (CPU-type) processing to parallel (GPU-type) processing. When implemented correctly, an algorithm ported to a parallel architecture can produce speed increases anywhere from 20X to over 400X. This can turn an overnight calculation into something you could do over coffee or even in real-time," he said.
"The ability to deliver the performance previously only achievable with multiple server clusters in a single GPU means HPC professionals can now have their own personal supercomputer that will enable them to get fast and reliable results at their desk," he added.
Derek Burke, Commercial Director at Panasas, said as the market widened there would have to be more applications to reduce the complexity.
"This can demand significant software development effort in order to parallelise the applications," he added. "There is pressure on all software developers to parallelise their software in order to enhance performance. This will take many mainstream applications into the domain of HPC."
