Steve Reynolds, OCF Sales Director: Even in the shadow of a recession, the explosion of data, growth in cloud services and predictive analytics has urged customers to look for ease of data management

If I reflect back over the past 10 years, what really stands out for me is the change in our customers’ approach to high performance computing. When we started up at OCF, our customers, who were primarily universities, would only be interested in pure hardware provision, happier to set up their own systems and spend time on building and refining three or four clusters to meet their ever changing requirements. These customers wanted to ‘get their hands dirty’ and learn themselves how to manage their appliances.

Then, around eight years ago, the new InfiniBand standard specification helped to make servers more efficient with better interconnection between servers, communications infrastructure equipment, storage and embedded systems. This prompted customers to turn their attention towards ease of management and increased efficiencies.

With hardware costing less than manpower, customers want their staff’s time to be more focused on their research in universities or other business operations in the commercial sector. Rather than getting caught up in building their own cluster systems, customers now prioritise making their operations more efficient with a better return on investment on their systems.

Even in the shadow of a recession, the explosion of data, growth in cloud services and predictive analytics has urged customers to look for ease of management and the best ways of managing high levels of information are with plug-in appliances and managed services.

The future is not a rail track we follow but a big wide road where we need to adapt, disrupt and be nimble

The HPC industry continues to face problems. First, the sheer speed of advance in processor technology is disruptive because it creates more power to be applied to a problem and software developments can’t keep up with processor changes.

Second, the cost and ability to access energy is a large problem. As a result, customers really have to consider energy efficiency when planning deployments. We are now reaching a situation where some large server clusters need have their own power stations! When we reach Exascale Computing (when data processing of certain code and calculations have move beyond current TeraFlops and PetaFlops into ExaFlop speeds), the energy profile of computers will need to change massively again to cope.

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Market growth is partly driven by reduction in cost per Teraflop. The Linux cluster has brought affordability right down.

The expansion of the high performance computing market, particularly into the private sector, is being driven by better awareness of how server clusters (and high performance computing in general) can support a mainstream business.

Market growth is also partly driven by reduction in cost per Teraflop. The Linux cluster has brought affordability right down. For example in 2002, a 16-processor machine might cost in the region of £250k, but today the same machine might cost just £5k.

The biggest disrupter has been the internet and use of IP enabled devices as previously mentioned. This has caused an explosion of digital data, structured and unstructured – that is making storage a far bigger customer challenge than ever before.

What hasn’t changed?

Ten years ago the top two suppliers of high performance computers on the Top500 list were IBM and HP and that still remains today. There has been no major disruptor entering the market. The major x86 processor vendor is still Intel as it was in 2002 (AMD came in around 2003/2004 and took some market share but has lost it again). Continue Reading »