Finding a Competitive Advantage with High Performance Computing

High Performance Computing (HPC), or supercomputing, is a critical enabling capability for many industries, including energy, aerospace, automotive, manufacturing, and more. However, one of the most important aspects of HPC is that HPC is not only an enabler, it is often also a differentiator – a fundamental means of gaining a competitive advantage.

Differentiating with HPC

Differentiating (gaining a competitive advantage) through HPC can include:

• faster - complete calculations in a shorter time;
• more - complete more computations in a given amount of time;
• better - undertake more complex computations;
• cheaper - deliver computations at a lower cost;
• confidence - increase the confidence in the results of the computations; and 
• impact - effectively exploiting the results of the computations in the business.

These are all powerful business benefits, enabling quicker and better decision making, reducing the cost of business operations, better understanding risk, supporting safety, etc.

Strategic delivery choices are the broad decisions about how to do/use HPC within an organization. This might include:

• choosing between cloud computing and traditional in-house HPC systems (or points on a spectrum between these two extremes);
• selecting between a cost-driven hardware philosophy and a capability-driven hardware philosophy;
• deciding on a balance of internal capability and externally acquired capability;
• choices on the balance of investment across hardware, software, people and processes.

The answers to these strategic choices will depend on the environment (market landscape, other players, etc.), how and where you want to navigate that environment, and why. This is an area where our consulting customers benefit from our expertise and experience. If I were to extract a core piece of advice from those many consulting projects, it would be: "explicitly make a decision rather than drift into one, and document the reasons, risk accepted, and stakeholder buy-in".

Which HPC technology?

A key means of differentiating with HPC, and one of the most visible, is through the choice of hardware technologies used and at what scale. The HPC market is currently enjoying (or is it suffering?) a broader range of credible hardware technology options than the previous few years.

HPC Getting More Choices - Technology Diversity

HPC has been easy for a while ...

When buying new workstations or personal computers, it is easy to adopt the simple mantra that a newer processor or higher clock frequency means your application will run faster. It is not totally true, but it works well enough. However, with High Performance Computing, HPC, it is more complicated.

HPC works by using parallel computing – the use of many computing elements together. The nature of these computing elements, how they are combined, the hardware and software ecosystems around them, and the challenges for the programmer and user vary significantly – between products and across time. Since HPC works by bringing together many technology elements, the interaction between those elements becomes as important as the elements themselves.

Whilst there has always been a variety of HPC technology solutions, there has been a strong degree of technical similarity of the majority of HPC systems in the last decade or so. This has meant that (i) code portability between platforms has been relatively easy to achieve and (ii) attention to on-node memory bandwidth (including cache optimization) and inter-node scaling aspects would get you a long way towards a single code base that performs well on many platforms.

Increase in HPC technology diversity

However, there is a marked trend of an increase in diversity of technology options over the last few years, with all signs that this is set to continue for the next few years. This includes breaking the near-ubiquity of Intel Xeon processors, the use of many-core processors for the compute elements, increasing complexity (and choice) of the data storage (memory) and movement (interconnect) hierarchies of HPC systems, new choices in software layers, new processor architectures, etc.

This means that unless your code is adjusted to effectively exploit the architecture of your HPC system, your code may not run faster at all on the newer system.

It also means HPC clusters proving themselves where custom supercomputers might have previously been the only option, and custom supercomputers delivering value where commodity clusters might have previously been the default.