Supercomputing goes mainstream

Is it wishful thinking on the part of IT vendors, or is there a real business demand for high-performance computing (HPC) systems?

While many analysts say that the long-term trend is for firms to use HPC technologies, the consensus is that it's at least two years away, probably more, before we see supercomputing making its way into the everyday world of business systems.

Yet many vendors seem to think differently. Intel, for example, notes that more than a third of the Supercomputing Top 500 systems are now operating in business environments rather than academia or research establishments - so Intel argues that HPC is already being used by mainstream businesses.

Meanwhile, HP has announced its XC Cluster systems, a new range of turnkey Linux cluster systems based on Intel Xeon and Itanium processors. The idea is to make it a lot easier to set up large cluster-based environments. The obvious target for such help is corporates, whose calculations on return on investment take into account how fast systems can be set up in a production environment.

So have the analysts got it all wrong regarding the timing of the arrival of HPC within businesses?

Not entirely. Intel's statement is disingenuous in that many of the businesses it lists as using HPC systems - the likes of BP, Lockheed-Martin and Daimler-Chrysler for example - are not using the systems to run standard business processes. Let's face it, these firms are running design and analysis programs that have more in common with the workloads of academia and research than a company's accounts department.

But that doesn't mean that it will take two years for HPC to be more widely embraced. Many firms are not using HPC systems for business just yet, but the chances are they will be sooner than the analysts suggest. Arguably, many should already be using them.

The reason analysts say HPC is at least two years away is nothing to do with the hardware or operating systems, but the lack of applications. But clearly there are already some applications that could benefit from HPC and, what is more, the need for IT managers to offer them to their business users is increasingly pressing.

Applications involving money are obvious candidates. Firms need to manage the processing of money, and the risks associated with the stuff. It is not only banks that suffer from fraud, money laundering, bad debts and the rest. These days, every company is a target. Analytic programs capable of handling large amounts of data very quickly could spot the trends and identify many problems. Clearly these programs could benefit from HPC systems.

Then there are business intelligence systems, which should now be the bedrock on which all business activity is built. But the bedrock of business intelligence is not the pretty on-screen dashboards of business intelligence tools. Dashboards are all useless if there is nothing to provide the analytics that underpin what appears.

It used to be thought that the database was the key component in business systems, but now the most important factors are how clean you can keep the data stored, how easily you can find the data you need, and how quickly you can then do something productive with this data. And that is what analytics is all about.

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