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July 21, 2006
The New Frontier: HPC in Enterprise Applications
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To the once-rarified list of human activities to which HPC has been frequently applied -- predicting the weather, simulating chemical reactions, sequencing genomes and so on -- one can now add business applications. This is particularly true in industries like aerospace and finance, which are heavily dependent on science, math and engineering, but HPC is turning up in less-expected places, like retail and insurance. As time goes on and HPC hardware gets less expensive, more powerful and easier to implement, the list of commercial uses for cluster-based supercomputing will expand as fast as business decision makers can find ways to translate it into a business advantage.
While off-the-shelf HPC has been widely available for several years, pundits have energetically debated the merits of the various technologies for just as long. Now it appears that just as monolithic, custom-built supercomputing towers have been largely outpaced by parallel cluster systems in universities and government labs, Itanium 2-based servers are an increasingly competitive choice for many of today's enterprise HPC needs.
Some of the reasons for Itanium 2-based systems' growing share of the enterprise HPC market include scalability, flexibility, low TCO and greater flexibility in terms of operating systems and software providers compared to RISC-based systems. As Itanium 2-based microprocessors continue to make inroads into uncharted business territories, the very definition of what constitutes HPC will shift.
On the Ground
Companies with a basis in engineering are the first places one might think to look for cutting-edge uses of 64-bit HPC to meet enterprise challenges, as these industries represent a bridge between "traditional" realms of supercomputing and more contemporary commercial applications. One such area where Itanium 2-based solutions are leading the pack is in auto manufacturing, where the ability to accurately simulate real-world conditions saves time and money and can result in a palpable competitive advantage.
Computer-aided engineering (CAE) has revolutionized the auto industry. Historically, the manufacture of a new car model could require as many as 60 or more physical prototypes for design, development and crash tests, and each prototype can cost up to $500,000 -- adding up to tens of millions of dollars in manufacturing costs before a single car is sold.
In the past decade, the increasing sophistication of mathematical simulations made possible by HPC has rapidly reduced the number of prototypes required before rolling out a new model to almost zero, resulting in substantially shortened production cycles for those manufacturers able to implement the technology most effectively.
Simulations are by their very nature memory intensive; the more data points that can be included, the more accurately the simulation maps to the physical world and the more precise the result will be. This is why 64-bit systems are ideal for CAE. With vastly superior on-board memory caching and I/O systems designed to deal with larger data volumes, servers based on the Intel Itanium 2 processor can provide faster, more accurate calculations at a lower price point than comparable RISC-based systems.
HPC also enables a greater ability to deliver innovation, particularly important in the luxury auto sector. For high-end car buyers, the smallest feature gains can make the difference between one brand and another. More accurate simulations result in improved functioning in the final product: less vibration, better performance in diverse conditions, more safety -- even improvements in climate control and the ability to de-ice windows are made possible by HPC.
In addition to the performance successes of Itanium 2-based systems for CAE, the approach computing vendors are taking to the overall HPC marketplace makes a big difference for these customers. Instead of trying to maintain a monopoly on its HPC solutions, Intel has partnered with as many different vendors as possible to provide the widest range of solutions to the users of Itanium 2-based systems, ensuring that the most sophisticated simulation tools will always be available to users of Itanium 2-based servers and clusters. The Itanium Solutions Alliance is one resource available for users and developers of Itanium-based systems, and offers programs, tools, workshops and directories that inform users of the variety of options available with Itanium 2-based solutions and also enables implementation.
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