Predictions for 2013 in HPC

As we stumble into the first weeks of 2013, it is the season for predictions about what the coming year will bring. In my case, following my recent review of HPC in 2012, I get to make some predictions for the world of HPC in 2013.


Buzzwords

First up, this year’s buzzword for HPC marketing and technology talks. Last year was very much the year of “Big Data” as a buzzword. As that starts to become old hat (and real work) a new buzzword will be required. Cynical? My prediction is that this year will see Big Data still present in HPC discussions and real usage but it will diminish in use as a buzzword. 2013 will probably spawn two buzzwords.

The first buzzword will be “energy-efficient computing”. We saw the use of this a little last year but I think it will become the dominant buzzword this year. Most technical talks will include some reference to energy-efficient computing (or the energy cost of the solution or etc.). All marketing departments will swing into action to brand their HPC products and services as energy efficient computing – much as they did with Big Data and before that, Cloud Computing, and so on. Yes, I’m being a tad cynical about the whole thing. I’m not suggesting that energy efficiency is not important – in fact it is essential to meet our ambitions in HPC. I’m merely noting its impending over-use as a theme. And of course, energy efficient computing is not the same as Green Computing – after all that buzzword is several years old now.

Energy efficiency will be driven by the need to find lower power solutions for exascale-era supercomputers (not just exascale systems but the small department petascale systems that will be expected at that time – not to mention consumer scale devices). It is worth noting that optimizing for power and energy may not be the same thing. The technology will also drive the debate – especially the anticipated contest between GPUs and Xeon Phi. And politically, energy efficient computing sounds better for attracting investment rather than “HPC technology research”.

The power of supercomputers - energy, exascale and elevators

Paul Henning has written on his blog (HPC Ruminations) about the growing issue of power requirements for large scale computing. Paul's blog post - "Familiarity Breeds Complacency" - is partly in response to my article at HPCwire - "Exascale: power is not the problem" and my follow-up disucssion on here - "Supercomputers and other large science facilities".

Paul makes several good points and his post is well worth reading. He ends with an observation that I've noted before (in my own words):

One of supercomputing's biggest strengths - it's ability to help almost all areas of science and engineering - is also one of it's greatest weaknesses - because there a portfolio of cases rather than a single compelling champion to drive attention and investment.

PS - I've added Paul's new blog to my list of HPC blogs and news sites.

Is power-hungry supercomputing OK now?

[Article by me on ZDNet UK, 23 September, 2010]

We may be planning for a 1,000-fold increase in compute power in the next decade, but what about the extra power consumption ...

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/emerging-tech/2010/09/23/is-power-hungry-supercomputing-ok-now-40090137/

Me on HPC and multicore

Things I have said (or have been attributed as saying - not always the same thing!) - some older interviews with me in various publications about HPC, multicore, etc ...


What You Should Know about Power and Performance Efficiency
Scientific Computing, August 2010, Suzanne Tracy

"Components driving power consumption fall into two categories — those that, as consumers, we cannot control, and those we can. Power consumed by server hardware is increasing and is beyond our direct control as buyers (although manufacturers are working to optimize power efficiency). The biggest factors we can influence are design and deployment of HPC systems as a whole (datacenter included) and recognizing total cost of ownership (including power) when procuring."

"The primary strategy for optimizing power is to ensure proper total cost of ownership (including power) as the driver of procurement, not purely peak performance and initial capital cost. This enables the evolutions of datacenter optimization (e.g. run warm, “free-cooling,” hot aisles) and choices of power-efficient HPC system designs (e.g. more parallelism, lower power processors, etcetera) to be correctly attributed as delivering increased performance against cost."

"Optimizing software and algorithms is a key opportunity to dramatically improve the total cost of ownership of HPC solutions. By optimizing applications, fewer resources are required to deliver the results, thus reducing the power required. Equally, innovations in algorithms can deliver applications that are power-aware — that is, they recognize the energy consumed and the user can balance energy-cost against time-to-solution when selecting algorithms for a given simulation."

"The primary breakthrough will be the recognition of the role software (both implementation efficiency and algorithm design) has to play in delivering cost savings related to power efficiency. Beyond that, the key hardware technologies will be increased use of power switching across the system — while many modern processors will reduce power when not fully utilized, the ability to gate specific parts of the chip will improve, and the same capability will work into other parts of the system — memory, interconnect (maybe balancing power against bandwidth on a job-by-job basis), I/O, etcetera."



Multiple cores multiply programming
Scientific Computing World, June 2010, Paul Schreier

"When it comes to parallel programming, it’s easy to do something that looks right, but it’s difficult to be sure it is right and will do the same thing under all conditions," says Andrew Jones.

"We strongly urge people to use prepackaged routines such as these where other people have done the difficult work of dividing up the tasks in an optimal way," says Jones.



Personal Supercomputers?
Genomeweb, October 2009, By Matthew Dublin

"There is always going to be a class of computing power that is much bigger than anything that will physically fit on your desk because if you can buy something for $1,000 or $10,000 then there are going to be users that are prepared to buy hundreds of them for a million dollars," Jones says. "And there's always going to be something that is orders of magnitude bigger than what most people can afford but the cheap stuff gets more powerful."

"I don't think there's anything wrong with the term 'personal supercomputing' if it successfully gets a whole lot more people making use of the compute power that's available," Jones says. "It's marketing, but it's perfectly valid marketing, aimed at an audience that would normally not go anywhere near large-scale supercomputers. ... HPC can do so much for people trying to do simulations and modeling that whatever we call it to get more people to using it, the better."



With virtualization, high-performance computing becomes more mainstream
SearchServerVirtualization.com, November 2008, By Jo Maitland

"Scheduling jobs, queuing jobs, shoring up resources, determining policies such as rejecting a job that doesn't have an estimate of how long the job is going to take … these are typical HPC skills but start to overlap when you're managing a virtualized compute environment," said Andrew Jones.

Jones said he does not believe mainstream computing will ever catch up with HPC. "By definition, HPC will always be more powerful than mainstream computing," he says.

Santa's HPC Woes

[Article by me for HPCwire, December 18, 2008]

In a break with centuries of reticence, perhaps the most widely recognised distributor of festive spirit and products, Santa Claus, has revealed some details of the HPC underpinning his time-critical global operations.

http://www.hpcwire.com/features/Santas-HPC-Woes-36399314.html

Supercomputing budgets: Fighting the financial storm

[Article by me on ZDNet UK, 12 November, 2008]

Steadily rising budgets for high-performance-computing projects are about to meet the chill winds of recession head on. The consequences could harm the real benefits this technology can offer ...

http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/it-strategy/2008/11/12/supercomputing-budgets-fighting-the-financial-storm-39543025/