HPCwire: Feast or Famine: A Hungry Analyst's Review of SC08

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Blogs

Blog: HPC Matters

HPC Matters is a joint blog consisting of contributors from the Tabor Communications team on their observations and insights into HPC matters.

HPC Matters | Main Blog Index

November 27, 2008

Feast or Famine: A Hungry Analyst's Review of SC08

It happens every year at the Supercomputing Conference and Expo, whether it's seafood in Seattle, pierogies in Pittsburgh, or anchos in Austin. Some days it's a feast, others a famine.

For those of you who, like me, used SC08 as an opportunity to synch up with important contacts, you know the drill. Or rather, you know the two different drills. In drill number one, you eat like a hobbit. After a 7:30 breakfast meeting you have a second breakfast meeting at 8:30. Then it's elevenses with your first lunch, followed by a proper lunch meeting that lasts a full hour. Fill up then, because you won't eat again until the meet-and-greet at 4:30, after which you have back-to-back dinners and at least two catered receptions to attend. You roll back to the hotel, and if you're lucky, you're at the Doubletree, so you can eat a fresh chocolate chip and walnut cookie in bed. (Really, those cookies are very good.)

Drill number two doesn't work that way. For whatever reason, your meetings line up differently the next day, and somehow you keep missing meals. If you're in the Doubletree, that delicious cookie is the only food you sniff all day. The Ritz will fetch you anything you want of course, but at other hotels, you might just go to bed hungry, dreaming of the two brunches you'll have tomorrow.

The food is incidental, of course, and what really matters is what you learn in the time you're there. Just in time for American Thanksgiving, here's a quick feast-or-famine guide to what you could gorge on in the HPC space, versus areas in which the cupboard is bare.

Interconnect Options: Feast

At my second dinner Monday evening, one vendor asked me if I thought InfiniBand could continue to survive with Mellanox as the only chip provider. Of course it could survive, I replied, because our data shows InfiniBand adoption continuing to grow in all interconnect segments. But it was likely that this growth would attract new entrants, and we'd eventually have more than one player. The next day, QLogic announced its own chips, lending a new option to a growing space.

Other sectors of the interconnect market are heating up as well. 10 Gigabit Ethernet has gone mainstream, with a wealth of vendors seeking to differentiate their offerings. The most interesting of these may be Myricom, which has remodeled its business plan to derive a majority of its revenue from 10GbE.

But neither of these developments is where I see the real action heating up over the next two years. The big trend to watch is now optics. Users in many verticals are expressing early interest in optical interconnects because of their potential in lowering latency. Avago, Finisar, Lightfleet, Luxtera, and Obsidian all had presences at SC08, and Tabor Research predicts we'll continue to see more from them over the next two years.

Utility Computing: Feast

Tabor Research surveys have shown a high degree of user interest in cloud computing. In this space, Arista made a splash by landing Silicon Valley visionary Andy Bechtolsheim, who is now championing that company's cloud strategy. In addition, a little-known company called Darkstrand made a big impression with its commercialization of access to supercomputing resources over the National LambdaRail network. Even demos in The MathWorks' booth showcased Amazon EC2. Cloud computing plays into the strengths of IBM and HP, the HPC server leaders, as well as Platform Computing, the leading middleware provider. Tabor Research expects these three companies to capitalize on the opportunity.

Server Vendors' Data Management Strategies: Famine

The evolution of pNFS is the most important story in HPC that no one is paying enough attention to. In beta now, pNFS will likely become a standard option in the first half of 2009 and go mainstream by the end of the year. With data management as one of users' most significant challenges, the server vendor community has yet to fully embrace the landscape shift that will start to take place between now and SC09.

The storage vendors are largely ready. Panasas has been publicly pushing pNFS since early 2007, and companies ranging from BlueArc to NetApp are well-positioned to gain from standardization in the file system arena. On the server side, the readiness is not as apparent, especially considering the big server vendors all sell storage products.

The lone strategic bright spot seems to be on Sun, the same company that popularized InfiniBand as a storage interconnect. Sun's Open Storage strategy is at times confusing but indubitably bold and is the most significant area of Sun differentiation in HPC. Plus, Sun owns Lustre now; I just wish they would do more with it. IBM has GPFS and will continue to ride that train successfully, at least for the near term. HP, Dell, and Cray all need to work on their data management solutions.

Accelerator Options: Feast

The biggest new product news here is NVIDIA's launch of its "personal supercomputer" based on its Tesla GPGPU. This exciting product has unfortunately been labeled with an albatross of a designator -- the industry is rife with failed, oxymoronic personal supercomputers -- but NVIDIA may have the clout and momentum to gain in academic and research markets while the marketing department figures out how to reposition for the industrial sector. The ecosystem around Tesla also continues to grow. NVIDIA partners (notably Acceleware) are pre-packaging Tesla-based solutions, and The Portland Group has been working on its own compilers for GPGPU. Intel's Nehalem CPU is an important consideration in this space, but in this case I think Intel's competitive heat is on AMD more than it is on NVIDIA.

But while everyone has been looking at GPGPU, an older accelerator category has slipped back into the mix: FPGA. Before you scoff, consider that FPGAs excel in areas in which GPGPUs have been weak, especially in scalable, high-bandwidth, text- or integer-based applications. This time around, programmability isn't at issue, because vendors like Convey, BlueArc, and XtremeData have integrated FPGAs into their offerings.

Convey enjoyed a terrific launch, thanks in part to the combined experience of Bruce Toal and Steve Wallach. (An interview with Wallach hit The New York Times during the show.) The FPGA-powered design is a major departure in computing architectures, and Convey could quickly become an interesting second-tier player alongside SiCortex, another differentiated architecture player with a strong SC08 showing.

Bring on the Next Course

Overall the energy of the show was strong, setting another attendance record (although that is as much a factor of the diversity of vendors than anything else). Still, amid these famine-oriented economic conditions, the SC08 floor was a refreshing island of plenty. In our most recent surveys, users indicated their budgets are still expected to grow over the next two years, and judging by the smorgasbord of activity in Austin, we could be ready to feast again in Portland in 2009.

Posted by Addison Snell - November 27 @ 10:48AM

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Discussion

There are 2 discussion items posted.

anchos?
Submitted by in_the_crease on 11/30/2008 - 1:03AM

do you mean nachos? ;)

Post #1

anchos
Submitted by addisonsnell on 12/01/2008 - 11:28AM

No, I meant anchos, although the nachos in Austin are also tasty.

Post #2

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

Addison Snell

Addison Snell is the CEO of InterSect 360 Research

More Addison Snell

Feature Articles

The Week in Review

TACC's Ranger supercomputer celebrates its second year of enabling important research; Microsoft partners with NSF to bring cloud services to researchers; and NSF submits its fiscal year 2011 budget request. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...

NASA Looks to Move Science Apps Into the Cloud

It seems only natural that the US space agency would be casting its eyes toward the clouds. Sure enough, NASA is now looking to cloud computing to optimize the operation of the agency's IT infrastructure for some of its science codes. Like many commercial businesses and government organizations, NASA is being asked to do more computing with fewer datacenter resources.
Read More...

Thoughts, Observations, Beliefs & Opinions About the NSF Supercomputer Centers

There is no such thing as an NSF (Supercomputer) Center and there never has been. There should be. What there are, in the words of Ed Hayes, then comptroller of NSF, are "NSF ASSISTED Supercomputer Centers." This is a double edged sword.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

IBM Releases Energy Efficient Power7 System

Feb 09 | eWeek Europe | Company says new high-end servers will deliver "intelligent performance." Read more...

Inductive Coupling Packs Flash Drive in a Chip

Feb 09 | EE Times | Wireless technology promises energy-efficient chip-to-chip communication. Read more...

IBM, Microsoft Help Create Montana Supercomputer

Feb 08 | eWeek | A new kind of Rocky Mountain high. Read more...

AMD Aims for GPUs in Mainstream Servers Starting 2012

Feb 08 | Computerworld | Chip maker hopes to bring CPU-GPU processors to servers in two years. Read more...

Graphene Transistors That Work at Blistering Speeds

Feb 05 | Technology Review | IBM has created graphene transistors that leave silicon ones in the dust. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

Appro Assists LLNL with Cluster Designed for Extreme Scale Visualization

Jan 11 | | LLNL is home to some of the fastest computers in the world. In 2012, LLNL expects to have the Sequoia supercomputing cluster operational with a projected performance of over 20 PFLOP/s. These systems will focus on strengthening the foundations of predictive simulation through running large suites of complex simulations and then comparing model predictions with experimental data. To visualize this project’s large amount of data, LLNL requested an Appro Supercomputing Cluster specifically designed to support interactive data analysis.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html