Although I have been quiet for a very long time now on this blog, I haven't exactly gone away. I have been watching a number of developments in leading edge computing for various reasons and have been taken up with that. Apologies to the dedicated fans of this site - both of you!.
Of a couple of pieces that struck me recently, one is Cycle Computing creating a 50,000-core virtual cluster on/in (?) the Amazon Cloud for one of its clients, reported at:
I guess that I am impressed by the size of the system ;-) and the way that it has been deployed.
There has long been a debate about the differences between HPC - as traditionally understood - and High Throughput Computing ("HTC"). The former being all about the very leading edge of computing technologies* and the latter is about the ability to deal with the large amounts of process as required by commercial enterprise. These latter probably don't wish to invest in supercomputers (capex limits etc etc) and who don't need to be at the very forefront but nonetheless need to be able to crank out large numbers of results fast.
In a lot of way the article is about what you can do if you want to achieve high throughputs without "a Cray". Let me make it clear that I am not saying that what Cycle and Schrodinger have done together isn't very advanced; it is in many ways, its just not PetaFlop computing (in fact the article doesn't give a peak performance figure, so I am guesstimating).
In a lot of way the article is about what you can do if you want to achieve high throughputs without "a Cray". Let me make it clear that I am not saying that what Cycle and Schrodinger have done together isn't very advanced; it is in many ways, its just not PetaFlop computing (in fact the article doesn't give a peak performance figure, so I am guesstimating).
While we are building very high-performance HPC, what much of commercial industry seeks something more like HTC where shed loads of not-necessarily hyper-complex problems can be handled as quickly as possible, and these may not even be numerically intensive. Indeed they are more likely to be data-intensive.
A long time ago I wrote about how Pervasive had built a kit of tools to enable their commercial clients to build parallel applications that run on clusters to achieve throughputs several thousand times greater that the client thought possible. this massive Cloud offers an huge extension of that an represents a substantial opportunity for commerce. Will they take? Undoubtedly. Who will lead the way in using it? That remains to be seen?
Another recent report highlighted that when people are asked what they see as the main requirement for HPC they say something like: "More of the same". There are some notable exceptions but... What are the new apps? I will write more about that later.
Cloud, or dedicated external servers, continues to represent the best form of access to HTC for many SMEs, especially if their usage is volatile.
OK so this isn't "true" multicore but is this the way (a way?) that multicore will be delivered to the man-in-the-street? Will true multicore computing remain the preserve of a priesthood? or does that smack somewhat of Thomas J Watson's alleged comment about the number of computers that are needed to "run the world"...?
*...and chauvinism latterly
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