subject: High Performance Computng-as-a-Service: The Future is Here [print this page] High Performance Computng-as-a-Service: The Future is Here
Competitive business complexities and increasingly demanding users are driving organizations to design better performing products and solutions. Commercial applications often have adequate compute power, but require access to High-Performance Computing (HPC) capabilities in form of high performance computing solutions that can increase efficiency, improve response times, enhance decision-making and help manage increasing data complexities.
Companies know they need high performance computing solutions if they have data analysis needs exceeding hundreds of GB/TB/PBs; have Secret Sauce-processes that need to be run faster; Repetitive/Sequential execution bottlenecks; applications that underutilize computing power; complex computing requirements; batch driven analysis of large data; are facing the near failure of the RDBMS (or expectation of failure in the future); and face the challenge of huge unstructured data analysis.
A number of organizations are deploying high performance computing solutions to deal with data complexities and the challenges of today's environments.
High performance computing solutions are gaining traction in the enterprise arena. High Performance Computing as a trend has gained momentum over the past two years, owing to different factors. Costly supercomputers are no longer required to undertake high-end data analytics, and voluminous number crunching tasks. These can now be performed by clusters of competitively priced servers, basically commodity hardware, that is networked to provide the very same computing power as that of the extremely advanced supercomputers.
The second development is the dawning of the Cloud era, which is eliminating the need for organizations and individuals to invest in expensive IT infrastructure to access and run applications. High performance computing solutions based on these two key trends are now within the reach of companies, and therefore gradually pervading the enterprise space. HPC, in fact, is being coupled with the Cloud to provide unmatched benefits to organizations.
In order to understand the nexus between HPC and the Cloud, and how high performance computing software can be delivered "as-a-service," it is pertinent to understand the finer points of both technology trends. HPC, as we have all come to know, is large scale computation and data processing. It is about large data that provides the benefits of scale, and incremental growth to organizations, enabling them to cut costs and flexibly leverage technology as their requirements increase or decrease.
The fact is that data accumulation rates are growing astronomically and managing data in traditional ways is getting difficult in the same proportion. HPC is emerging as a champion for large-scale data management needs. It is required by businesses that rely on high powered analytics to provide data driven insights, companies that need more than simple reports and dashboards.
