HPCwire: HP's Long Haul Itanium Strategy

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April 28, 2006

HP's Long Haul Itanium Strategy

, Editor, HPCwire

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This past week at the Gelato Itanium Conference & Expo (ICE), attendees got an opportunity to hear about the latest developments in the world of Linux on Itanium. Prior to his keynote address at the conference, we spoke with Jerry Huck, HP Fellow with the company's server global business unit that produces the Itanium-based HP Integrity servers. Huck was one of the original developers of the architecture and now focuses his attention on moving the Itanium strategy forward as well as evangelizing HP's server offerings. We also talked to Ed Turkel, manager of the product and technology marketing group for HP's High-Performance Computing Division, who shared his perspectives about Itanium in the HPC marketplace.

System design is all about balance

One of the main thrusts of Huck's Gelato ICE keynote was how system designers deal with a variety of issues when building high performance systems. Balancing different aspects of performance with power requirements, as well as costs, makes the design of high-end systems a challenging endeavor.

According to Huck, anytime you move above the commodity system level, you encounter a set of non-linearities where higher levels of capacity, bandwidth, latency and reliability are achieved with higher cost components. The benefits of these are obvious, but for the HPC and mission-critical server market you need to play close attention to the optimal mix of capabilities. For the design engineer, it's often tempting to add capabilities beyond what the customer really needs.

"As system designers, we have to put in the right amount of those characteristics that meets the needs -- without going overboard," says Huck.

The current challenge of multi-core processors is another concern for the system designer. The amount of parallelism that can be provided by multiple cores on a chip must be carefully matched to the intended use.

"What is the right direction for providing the appropriate amount of capacity for large-scale systems," asks Huck? "If we just continue to say we want to have at least as many sockets as we used to have, now you're challenged with 128 cores or 256 cores -- machines that in the past were more like the exotic dedicated machines used by the high performance computing community. But it's not so easy for a standard business to take 256 cores and get it to work well on an Oracle database."

Another looming issue for the system designer today is power and cooling. As hardware components shrink, systems become more powerful, but also more dense, leading to power and cooling problems. To address these problems, designers are being forced to think outside the rack.

"What's fueling this is that the price of cycles has been dropping," says Huck. "We're always delivering lower power per unit of work over the years; it just hasn't been as good a slope as the performance curve. The amount of energy used by the CPUs as they get more integrated and become a bigger part of the system has become a larger fraction of the overall system. So as system designers we're seeing power dissipation becoming more of an issue. The other related challenge is that density is going up. The energy per cubic meter is driving in a direction that is making it a real challenge to cool these things."

Huck admits that system designers are just able to keep up in this area. He says they haven't hit any kind of brick wall in terms of dealing with the heat, but it's not just a matter of running a little more air over the machines. You need colder air and you need to be more efficient with it. Water cooling is emerging as a viable strategy.

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