Data Center
HPC Spinoffs
HPC features trickle down to regular IT.
Big Linux systems plot climate change, simulate nuclear explosions, and secure bragging rights. But IT customers are starting to find that high-performance computing technologies make a difference in the real world, from clustered processing to data center greening.
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High Performance Computing (HPC) has long been the watchword of supercomputing centers, where huge government and university research centers, such as the Lawrence Livermore and Sandia national laboratories, use Linux to process huge data sets. Now, HPC spinoff technnology is arriving in the enterprise and SMB Linux markets.
Just as the U.S. space program afforded such innovations as scratch resistant sunglasses, all-weather winter radial tire for cars, and equipment for hospitals to monitor patients' vital signs, so has HPC been the source of innovation for smaller scale architectures. The technology used to run HPC is spilling over to mainstream IT, reaching smaller entities and companies with a much smaller scale than Livermore use or Sandia National Laboratory might have. Enterprise and SMB market have an abundance of resources to draw from traditional HPC computing.
"Today, many more organizations are able to take advantage of High Performance Computing, due to the ready availability of inexpensive compute clusters powered by Linux running on off-the-shelf x86 hardware, as opposed to the proprietary hardware and software of yesterday’s supercomputers," says Sam Charrington, Vice President of Product Management and Marketing for Appistry, Inc. The accessibility and availability of HPC technology is a big driver for scaled down markets, and so is another consideration: physical environmental controls.
Bill Thirsk, CIO of Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York, believes that innovations from HPC that avail themselves to mainstream SMB and enterprise IT environments are many: in physical environmental controls, efficient processors, scalability with lower power consumption, and less need for network fabric.
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