HPC Spinoffs

"The HPC market is where vendors test out the ideas that will drive tomorrow's commercial products," says Meike Chabowski, Technical Product Marketing Manager at SUSE Products, Novell. "The current generation of servers from all of the major vendors -IBM, Sun Microsystems, HP, Fujitsu [and] Siemens -may look on the outside like vanilla symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) servers, but under the covers, they more closely resemble the parallel machines favored by supercomputer buyers today."

According to Alanna Dwyer, marketing manager for high-performance computer solutions at HP, HPC technology has enabled industry users to achieve the highest efficiency and utilization rates for their systems. This development coupled with accessibility, ease of use, and affordable hardware and software has prompted SMBs and smaller workgroups to get onboard with some of the same tools and methods that the big players use.

"With higher utilization on their servers, the enterprise/SMB market can benefit from the Linux tools and methodologies developed in HPC for managing groups of systems in light-weight, efficient manner, and also from storage management solutions to enable higher I/O and file capacity required as utilization grows," says Dwyer. "With new and innovative high-performance computing hitting the market on a constant basis, Enterprise/SMB customers are being forced to learn how to best utilize HPC technologies to better their business outcomes."

These same tools are also being used on a smaller scale to design, test and analyze new product concepts.

"These companies are trying to accelerate their time to market with more innovative and reliable products," says Len Rosenthal, Chief Marketing Officer at Panasas, who provides a storage system for scalable Linux clusters. "Financial firms are using HPC to determine trading strategies and analyze risk to improve their profitability. Media and Internet companies are using HPC technology to scale their file serving infrastructure to handle massive user demand."

Chabowski further adds that companies like 3M, Proctor & Gamble, Boeing, BP and ConocoPhilips are using HPC clusters every day in business-critical applications.

"What you are increasingly seeing is commercial application of HPC technologies to help companies bring new products to market, and many of them through areas of simulation," says Chabowski. "Companies like BMW and Boeing will do more computer-based simulation rather than continue to use wind tunnels, which take longer and are more expensive. In the commercial world, it's things like, How do I mix a liquid? How do I model how the chemicals are mixed in there? How do I make sure that bottle will withstand any shock it may receive as it goes down the production line?"

There are numerous other examples. HPC is being used for real-time trading, particularly for complex risk analysis in finance applications. Web based applications for extreme scale web based technology demands by companies such as Google and eBay are being implemented with sophisticated technology thanks to HPC. Pharmaceutical and Biotech firms are performing research at the enterprise level that was once performed mostly by government and university research labs, also courtesy of HPC technology. Even the animation industry has adopted HPC solutions for computing, visualization and storage applications.

Suse says that if you take go-go companies like eBay, Google, or Amazon, you will see technology that bears a semblance to the HPC environment. Say Suse, "even if the web-based transactions or searches are not traditional HPC applications or workloads as such, these companies use HPC or supercomputing technologies to deal with all the data processing and run them at extreme scale."