Business perspective of HPC

BANGALORE, INDIA: Most people know that supercomputers are used to solve some of the world’s most difficult problems, everything from simulating a nuclear explosion, to customer snapshots, to probing the early history of the universe, to predicting the weather.

However, High Performance Computing (HPC) is for much more than just scientific computing; today HPC is used as a critical tool in enterprise environments as well.  No longer limited to the realm of nuclear physics, cosmological and environmental research, and other scientific and academic endeavors, HPC now offers mainstream industries an edge in real-time operations and complex calculations increasingly important to business performance.

Companies all over the world are taking advantage of HPC technology to gain a leading edge and become more competitive. Companies such as Speedo have been using HPC techniques to design faster swimsuits. Sailmaker WB-Sails has used HPC to custom design more efficient sails for sail boats. And Walmart uses HPC to mine its huge database to figure out what products to ship where, when.

HPC: Not just for rocket scientists anymore
Many think that HPC is some sort of extremely complex and technical solution that is difficult to understand. It is true to a certain extent that just like any subject in IT, it can indeed get very technical, very quickly. The concept of HPC is quite simple: HPC describes a hardware and software solution used to solve very complex problems or simulate complex processes.

More typically, an HPC environment consists of a compute cluster with associated software and storage. A cluster is essentially a number of separate compute nodes connected by a high speed network.

Today, increasingly, HPC systems are becoming cheaper and easier to install and, in many cases, provide the only cost effective way to solve complex business problems.

HPC provides companies three things: better products, competitive edge and cost savings.

Delivering better products: Companies can now solver their complex problems faster and arrive at better decisions more quickly, they can choose to either get their product to market faster or build a better quality product or both.

Giving companies a competitive edge: Companies can build a better product and get it to market faster, it gives them a competitive edge. In today’s world making the right decisions quickly and getting to market first is essential.

Saving money: HPC is the only cost effective way of solving certain complex problems. By using commodity components, and open source technologies HPC solutions are now accessible to anyone. Technology is improving all the time and day by day, not only are the new systems faster and cheaper, but they are also much more energy efficient, which means more  costs savings.

HPC scenario
High-performance computing (HPC) running computationally intensive workloads of significant size is growing a lot faster than the general computing market, in large parts because the use of HPC is expanding into new roles, broadening into new functions inside an organization and delivering business advantages that previously did not apply HPC.

The capabilities of computing equipment increase over time, thus reaching high enough to take on workloads that had been unattainable. This is true for the largest problems, those that require the biggest clusters or supercomputers to solve in a reasonable time or for sufficient resolution. Faster processors, systems with more processors and more-effective infrastructures can yield systems at higher total capacity, enabling their use to tackle new challenges. 

Role of HPC in key industries
Manufacturing: Numerical simulation of real-world problems has become standard practice among manufacturers worldwide, helping to reduce costs and meet short time-to-market windows while improving product quality, optimizing materials usage, and addressing increasingly stringent governmental safety and environmental regulations.

Life sciences: As drug design gets more expensive and competition more fierce, the ability to get results to market faster can mean large payoffs for a corporation. Today HPC can accommodate this industry's wide range of computational needs, as well as support the required needs to solve its fascinating problems. HPC plays a very vital role in drug discovery, life science manufacturing, preclinical research and research & development areas.

Energy/oil and gas: Upstream organizations know that high performance computing is the most effective way to enable geoscientists to speed their most complex, data-intensive projects to completion. Drilling for new oil is an expensive proposition. Using HPC technologies, engineers can be more confident on their return on investment.

Financial services: Organizations in today's financial industry are facing an unprecedented number of market wrenching challenges due to growing volumes of algorithmic trading, the impending enactment of trading regulations, higher demands of real time processing, and are under tremendous pressure to rearchitect their systems to stay ahead of competition.

Today's financial institutions require a new type of IT solution that can adapt immediately, deliver extreme real time security, availability, and ensure data integrity with full accountability and lower total cost-of-Ownership. HPC technologies can deliver powerful, flexible, and scalable solutions that integrate and leverage existing systems while delivering vastly increased computing power at low latency and lower operating risk.

Today, HPC is no longer just for scientists, researchers and academia. Commercial enterprises are also looking for an edge to help solve highly complex problems, perform business-critical analysis or run computationally intensive workloads.

HPC in India
While HPC in India is an emerging technology, the need for HPC has steadily increased over the years. From R&D specific scenarios, HPC is increasingly gaining steam in mainstream computing areas such as telecom, finance and manufacturing are going for HPC deployments.

The manufacturing and BFSI sectors in India have been leaders in adoption of HPC solutions, whether for structural analysis, crash simulation or financial analysis respectively. Even small life sciences companies that want to understand protein-folding characteristics have been adopting HPC.

Apart from traditional applications used by customers of technical background, there has been traction of HPC adoption amongst commercial customers for applications such as financial analysis and portfolio management, digital security and surveillance, and decision support computing as well.

The author is Director-Technology, Systems Practice, Sun Microsystems India.

Credits: Gartner report on HPC.