Latest Technology News Today – Get Latest Information Technology Updates and Services Latest Technology News Today – Get Latest Information Technology Updates and Services 
High Performance Computing is now moving beyond scientific, engineering applications. With Big Data exploding, and commercial applications needing high performance processing, the demand for HPC is like never before. Cloud based HPC infrastructure enables small businesses needing high performance computing achieve their results. With focus on voluntary groups and competency centres, vendors in India are investing for growth of HPC market in India.
According to Gartner, High Performance computing market (HPC) Market Revenue Grew by 6.9% in 2013. The global HPC market revenue will reach $36 billion in the year 2015. These are traditionally driven by technology players of large scale.
High performance computing is a cluster of processors which endeavour to deliver faster performance when compared to normal processors. The applications of such processor-clusters vary, but they help solve high compute-intensive problems in subjects like Engineering, analytics, science and business. Normally high performance computers vary between 16 and 64 ‘nodes’. Each processor unit of the cluster is called a ‘node’. High Performance Computing has various uses – it helps in weather forecasting, and scientific applications. Mr. Prasad Kshirsagar, Director, Pace Infotech, a system integrator that enables implementation of system infrastructure (for ERP and high end applications like Microsoft and SAP), points out, ‘”What is making the big difference is the ‘cloud’ approach in the HPC market. For startups, focusing on Analytics and Big Data, for example, it is important that HPC clusters can be provisioned to deliver the much needed ‘crunching’ which can help data ‘munching’.”
A cloud based approach helps small businesses to minimize ‘capital expenditure’ and avoid costly implementation. Instead, by leveraging HPC cluster service providers, these SMBs can leverage the ‘provisioning on the fly’ facilities on offer. Since the demand is from various start-up segments the data centres hosting HPC solutions will see exponential demands.
Another major adopter of high performance computing are the governments. Projects like UID, Passport services demand both high transaction processing and analytics processing – both need high performing clusters. Government of India is seen a major spender on high performance computing. Institutions like CDAC, Department of Atomic Energy and others use high performance computing – for ‘supercomputing’. India hosts some of the most powerful HPC in the world.
Banking, retail and telecom are other major sectors – where high performance computing are experiencing a rapid adoption. For data simulation, modelling, analytics of different information sources, processes and events – high performance computing seems to be the favoured way.
“With such high demand for HPC across sectors, factors like cost competitiveness and product (processor) innovation is what is differentiating between the leaders and others in the fray. “Linux clusters are the most favoured cluster-forms for cost effective and flexible solutions,” Prasad says. “The increase in commercial web applications and enterprise software like SAP or Oracle have created demands”, he adds.
Other factors that drive demand for high performance computing are cloud computing, Big Data convergence, advancement in ‘embedded processors’, processor cooling techniques, and memory caches. Embedded processors are processers that have dedicated compute, memory and I/O units. They are embedded into devices that are multi-functional in nature. According to research firm Technavio, Embedded processors market will grow at a CAGR of 5.8% between 2013 and 2018.
Today, mobile devices such as smart phones and tablets are integrated with embedded processors. Embedded processors have become an integral part of mobile devices because of their multi-tasking abilities. Therefore, with the progress in Smartphone technology, the demand for embedded processors is expected to increase. Smartphones and tablets in particular are witnessing high demand from end-users, which will propel the growth of the Global Embedded Processor Market.
“ Enterprises are now resorting to cloud for high performance applications,” Prasad points out,” ‘Embedded Processors on the cloud’ will provide Enterprises the flexibility to provision and process the computing demands of different applications at the same time,” talking about how he works with different datacenter service providers to design high computing solutions for ERP on the cloud.
HPC market is divided based on deployment as well. The traditional deployment of high performance computing has been inhouse. Government organizations, research institutions (in science, technology and education), enterprises, telecom vendors have all kept high performance computing clusters in house. However, with cloud computing maturing and becoming more secure, there is a shift in terms of hosting the HPC clusters on a private cloud outside the premises. “These are early trends” says Prasad,” One can see compute-intensive applications moving out of the premises on cloud in the next few quarters”.
HPC components like Storage, Server, Networking have their respective technology providers. Some of the prominent players in the high performance computing market include IBM, HP, Intel, Microsoft, Cisco, AMD, Bull, Dell, and Oracle among the others. Companies operating in the high performance computing market are developing solutions to maintain accuracy, stability, and fast convergence to correct solution which would help them to attain sustained growth in the market.
The most exciting new arrival in the HPC market is ‘Exascale’. According to insideHPC.com, Exascale computing refers to computing systems capable of at least one exaFLOPS, or a billion billion calculations per second. Such capacity represents a thousand fold increase over the first petascale computer that came into operation in 2008. Exascale is expected to arrive at 2020, and early indications are that it will make appearance in Japan or China.
In India, however, the major deployments of HPC for the next three years will be Big Data. “Some of the mature enterprises in retail,” Prasad points out, “are looking to process data what have built over for years to meaningful pointers for business”. This has been already coined by IDC as ‘High Performance Data Analysis’ – HPDA. Globally, HPDA might be the next big application on HPC. HPC is well positioned to enable Big Data use cases through all three phases of typical workflows, including: data capture and filtering; analytics; and results visualization. In addition to the three phases, the speed of computation matters just as much as the scale. The full potential of Big Data can be unlocked only when it is paired with high power processing. Few industries can benefit as much from converged Big Data and HPC as the life sciences, where the data sets are enormous, the queries and comparisons intensive, and the visualizations complex. Hadoop clusters can leverage ‘Infiniband technology’ a HPC nerve, co-processors and accelerators for faster computing, and finally meet HPC on the cloud (the newest rendezvous point between HPC and Big Data). This convergence will result in HPDA on Demand.
HPC interest groups are forming in India – especially to discuss learning, finding and cultivating skill and talent. Fujitsu, in 2014, became the first vendor to launch a HPC competency centre India, aiming to double revenues. This competency centre will allow engineers, scientists and data specialists in India to leverage and solve complex data and application problems that demand HPC. There is lot of action from various technology providers in HPC Server, Storage and networking in the next 3 years, according to Gartner- this also implies lot of service opportunities for channels in the area of High Performance Computing.
