Top 5 HPC trends
Feb 20th, 2009 by admin
Computer technology review recently published a list of what it considers to the the top 5 HPC trends:
- HPC is becoming more mainstream
- Green IT initiatives are becoming real
- Cloud/SaaS/IaaS is becoming concrete
- Traditional Datacentres are loosing favour
- Web 2.0 is driving a new era for storage
I don’t disagree that these are top trends, and I see the decline as the datacentre and the increase in SaaS and Cloud as connected, but I do think that the clear omission is the resurgence of easy(ish) to program specialist HPC technology such as GPGPU’s, FPGA’s and specialist multipurpose chips such as the Cell broadband engine and Larabee.
In 2000, the top of the top500 list was 4 TF machine which filled a room. Now you can squeeze this amount of processing power into a desktop (see previous posts about NVIDIA Tesla). It is an interesting twist, as we have seen the rise of easy to program commodity hardware and software based clusters over the last few years, and this has driven HPC towards the SaaS and cloud market, but we are also seeing that for low latency, high performance HPC users are more prepared to roll up thier sleeves and do something more proprietary - a bit like the old (less boring? more specialised?) days.
This is good news for those of us who like that kind of thing. Clearly HPC is widening in scope - a good thing - and its nice to see that the original aims, High Performance, are still available.
