HPCwire: The Big Ugly

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June 25, 2008

The Big Ugly

Back at the Newport HPCC conference in 2007, I broached the sensitive topic of whether the current ultra-scale procurement programs were good for the HPC industry by driving innovation into the market; or were these programs, in fact, draining resources, margin and long term opportunity out of the market?

This remained a hot topic in 2008, with Stephen Wheat of Intel driving a discussion about the business and R&D model for HPC innovation and the countervailing trends and behavior of the large funding agencies. If you haven’t read John West’s April 25th article in HPCwire entitled “HPC Innovation in the Era of “Good Enough,” I would urge you to do so. Using Wheat’s presentation and comments by others, including Dan Reed, he captures the issues and makes some persuasive arguments about what needs to be done.

But getting back to the issue at hand, I would like you to ruminate on the following: If you were to look at the history of NSF Tier 2 bids, the number of submissions has declined substantially. As a case in point, in the recent round, the NSF received only five bids. If you were to look carefully, both IBM and HP were conspicuously absent. In comparison, in the first round, IBM alone submitted eight bids! I would ask why?

Deals such as TACC do little to help the issue and unfortunately drive the business fundamentals out of the HPC business. While the Agency folks may think these ultra-scale systems are buoyed through cross-subsidization, I can tell you first hand they are not. The HPC divisions of even the largest suppliers, such as IBM and HP, must stand on their own merits. This means a strong business model and robust margins. The dirty little secret is that despite the high ticket price of these systems, there is typically not enough money to cover the direct and indirect costs of building a petascale system (remember software!), let alone margin to invest in the next innovation cycle. And in my humble opinion, the problem is getting worse, not better.

Now clearly this is not a simple issue as the broader stakeholders are all party to this dance. For the vendor community, the lure of being "chosen" is huge, further reinforcing this dynamic. As a long-term industry observer, the graveyard of suppliers who have fallen victim to the "halo" of participation is deep, with LNXI being the most recent casualty. If the big guys can’t sustain it, who can?

Posted by Debra Goldfarb - June 25 @ 4:01PM

Discussion

There are 4 discussion items posted.

changes in the HPC market
Submitted by $user.username on 05/31/2008 - 11:04AM

Most of the changes in the HPC market over the last 20 years have involved shifting to lower price points -- providing improved turnaround (due to reduced resource sharing) and improved price/performance (due to volume-related economies of scale). These have been very effective at enabling scientific & engineering computing at many levels, but with generally detrimental effects on the viability of the extreme high end. It seems to me that we have completed the "commoditization" of the scientific and technical computing markets -- cores are cheap enough that there is no need to share, and volumes of commodity processors are so high that there would be no cost benefit from making more of them. For a few years, low-end and mid-range HPC users have been able to afford more cores than they could effectively use for a single job, but have been able to exploit modest levels of task parallelism to keep their systems busy with useful work. Unfortunately, the "power wall" has forced almost all processor designs to rapidly shift toward greater and greater parallelism, with relatively steady single-thread performance. Improvements in cost/performance and power/performance can typically be obtained only by going further down this path, or by designing and configuring systems to be much more specifically tuned to a particular workload. It will be challenging to balance the requirements of creating customized and semi-customized systems for specific application areas without destroying the economies of scale that make commodity products inexpensive.

(Administrators note: This post was contributed by John McCalpin.)

Post #1

Innovation
Submitted by $user.username on 06/02/2008 - 7:44AM

Innovation isn't dead, it just doesn't thrive on winner-take-all risk-averse giant procurements. So if the big procurements don't act as technology spurs in the big organizations, and they aren't profitable on their own, why would BigCo bid on them? And commodity scaling isn't the barrier here: small teams can take advantage of the only true commodities in computing: DRAMs and silicon wafers. For more on this, check out http://www.bigncomputing.org/Big_N_Computing/Big_N_Computing/Entries/2008/5/8_Small_Teams_and_BIG_THINGS.html (sorry for the long URL)

(Administrators note: This post was contributed by Matt Reilly.)

Post #2

Innovation vs innovation
Submitted by $user.username on 06/02/2008 - 5:28PM

Clearly there is a big difference between the forces behind Blue Gene to enable innovation in domains that are deep research with time horizons of 5-10 years versus forces behind a small team startup that tries to leverage some new insight for economic gain.

Commercial entities will find it hard to invest in infrastructure for long term horizons (>10year time). They may invest in core competency but they can't invest in infrastructure without getting their stockholders up in arms. Talking about arms, the procurement of strategic weapon systems is also done up front: the science and engineering will follow, so defense related procurements have funded quite a bit of the engineering prowess of the US.

So big procurements do generate loads of innovation and much of aerospace is dependent on them. However, the trickle down effect of these procurements has proven to be negative. And I think that is the connection with your observation that commercially successful innovation comes from the bottom up. Did I understand you correctly?

(Administrators note: This post was contributed by Theodore Omtzigt.)

Post #3

Innovation and $
Submitted by $user.username on 06/05/2008 - 6:38AM

Theodore:
I was suggesting that innovation comes from "the bottom up," but I'd rather not think of myself at "the bottom."

The point that I was trying to make is that real innovation resulting from giant procurements is actually pretty rare.

As for strategic weapons systems, the computing market has gotten so large relative to the capital spent on the defense imperatives, that commercial
(specifically desktop and mobile) markets drive innovation in the largest companies.

And I've got stats, graphs, and 8x10 color glossies with a paragraph on the back of each one to elaborate on this. ;)

Matt Reilly
Chief Engineer
SiCortex, Inc

Post #4

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Debra Goldfarb

Debra Goldfarb, President and CEO of Tabor Communications, Inc., is 20+ year veteran of the High Productivity Computing industry.

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