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Supercomputing to save the planet: An interview with Fujitsu CTO Vivek Mahajan

Vivek Mahajan, Fujitsu's CTO, spoke about the importance of sustainability in IT at the company's recent Tech Summit event

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Vivek Mahajan, Fujitsu's CTO, spoke about the importance of sustainability in IT at the company's recent Tech Summit event

The true power of the cloud in the future will come with democratising HPC and quantum computers for the masses

Cloud computing is essential to helping IT transition to more sustainable operations, thanks to the centralisation of computing power and energy consumption. Growth, especially over the last two years, has been strong, and Fujitsu CTO Vivek Mahajan expects today's infrastructure as a service model to move beyond traditional silicon - sooner rather than later.

One of the main uses of modern cloud is to provide higher levels of compute power, but this really just comes down to doing your work on a slightly superior machine. It might be faster, but it has the same limitations as your office laptop.

Mahajan, though, sees a future where quantum and high performance computing (HPC) are available to the masses.

"With computing today you've got HPC...which has the ability to process massive amounts of data at a very fast pace - but it has been confined in a very narrow view of, you know, weather forecasting, some national security stuff, maybe academia driving some esoteric demands like genome analysis.

"We believe it's going to become much more widespread. Peoples' needs for computing will increase more and more, they'll be exponential, and traditional hardware won't be able to keep pace with that. What we call HPC or supercomputing today will be democratised and used by masses."

But HPC/supercomputing - and its more advanced cousin, quantum computing - are expensive and energy-intensive. As Mahajan points out, "You and I personally cannot afford a supercomputer sitting in the backyard."

He believes the answer lies in "compute-as-a-service" (CaaS), a system that could provide supercomputing ability to anyone with an internet connection.

Picture a world where you have a business problem your on-site machines can't handle, and so hand it over to CaaS. In Mahajan's vision, an AI broker would decide what system is best suited to address it - HPC, quantum, quantum-inspired or something else - and assign it to that service.

"How does this tie into sustainability? Because at the end of the day, when you have this technical effort, people won't need to buy a whole lot of hardware or software: it is as-a-service. You don't need many of those [components] if you can bring them all together.

"So, our goal is the computing workload broker has these green machines sitting below it. Hopefully they're all much more energy efficient than anything you have today, but then people only use what they need to use at a time frame that they need to use."

As well as directly lowering greenhouse gas emissions by centralising computing, advanced computing systems can make organisations more sustainable indirectly, through optimisation that traditional silicon would struggle with.

Fujitsu's trial with the Hamburg Port Authority last year is one example. The Authority used the company's Digital Annealer - a circuit design inspired by quantum computing - to optimise traffic flows, leading to lower congestion, faster turnaround and an overall nine per cent drop in CO2 emissions.

Closer to home - but also much further away - the UK Space Agency is working with Fujitsu's Digital Annealer to more efficiently clear space debris, potentially lowering fuel costs by as much as 20 per cent.

Investing in environmentally friendly solutions like cloud supercomputing, low-power chips and AI has a high initial cost, but Mahajan believes it's justified - and not only justified, but necessary.

"Maybe the ROI is not there in six months or 12 months, but it makes sound business sense for us in the long term. You won't be able to survive in the market without it: the cost of not being green will be much more expensive than the cost of being green. That's how we see it."

Supercomputing to save the planet: An interview with Fujitsu CTO Vivek Mahajan

The true power of the cloud in the future will come with democratising HPC and quantum computers for the masses

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