On a growth spree

Thanks to hardware commoditization and the technology's socio-economic impact, High Performance Computing is seeing growing interest in the Indian subcontinent. By Harshal Kallyanpur

Think High Performance Computing (HPC) and the first thought that comes to mind is that of towers of computers sitting in a room crunching data 24x7. Known for processing millions of computer instructions in a second, these systems are a favorite among weather departments, physics and biological research laboratories, space research centers and the like.

Traditionally, HPC systems have been towers of servers with hundreds of processors as well as a large amount of memory and storage. Numerous such systems would be stacked together and interconnected to each other to form a supercomputer crunching huge amounts of data per second. Most of these systems featured a strong parallel processing system and applications that tied together all of the computer systems into a single supercomputer.

However, such large systems meant that they took up a lot of space and had huge power and cooling implications. Moreover, given the complex nature of the hardware and the corresponding costs, only specific industry verticals, institutes and organizations could afford to deploy such systems.

"The early Cray systems had special coolant fluids running through hoses. Supercomputers in the late 1980s and early 1990s would have a extremely high entry price point, something that would eventually limit their affordability to a handful of government and defense customers or large research labs. Many of these supercomputers were simply not available to customers outside North America, Europe and Japan," said R Ramanan, MD & CEO, CMC Limited.

Early supercomputers or HPC systems had proprietary architectures and essentially required a significant amount of code optimization or tuning in order to best exploit the full feature set of those architectures. Software developers had to re-instrument their applications, insert compiler directives etc. (each specific to different vendors). This used to be a painstakingly tedious effort.

Evolution of HPC

The late 1990s saw Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) hardware gaining popularity among organizations for creating supercomputers as these offered a cheaper alternative over the traditional, expensive, energy guzzling machines. The performance deficit could be addressed by adding more processors to the system.

"COTS hardware offered compelling price-performance benefits of at least ten times when compared...