HPCwire: IDC's HPC User Forum Meets In Manchester

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November 03, 2006

IDC's HPC User Forum Meets In Manchester

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The 22nd meeting of the IDC HPC User Forum, held in Manchester, UK, last week, brought together more than 80 UK, European and U.S. participants to discuss leading-edge research, market dynamics and vendor strategies. The local host for the meeting was the University of Manchester. Vendor sponsors included Cray, HP, IBM, INTEL, Panasas and Sun Microsystems. HPC User Forum meetings are co-sponsored by HPCwire.

Attendees were welcomed by IDC's Earl Joseph, executive director of the HPC User Forum; Steering Committee Chairman Paul Muzio, who is VP-Government Programs for Network Computing Services, Inc. and Support Infrastructure Director of the Army High Performance Computing Research Center (AHPCRC); and Terry Hewitt, Head of Supercomputing, Visualization and e-Science (SVE) and Director of the International AVS Centre at Manchester Computing. Other participating HPC User Forum Steering Committee members were Paul Buerger, OSC; Steve Finn, BAE Systems; Sharan Kalwani, General Motors; and Jim Kasdorf, PSC.

The two-day meeting began with an optional tour of the University of Manchester, showcasing Manchester's pioneering role in building the first computers.

Addison Snell presented IDC's HPC technical server market update, noting that the market has had aggregate revenue growth of 94 percent since 2002 and grew 24 percent in 2005 alone. Clusters represented close to half the overall $9.2 billion market revenue for 2005. The capability market has declined 13 percent since 2002, while strong growth at the lower end of the market has boosted revenue in the workgroup segment 200 percent, in the departmental segment 155 percent, and in the divisional segment 84 percent since 2002. The overall leaders by revenue share in 2005 were HP and IBM, with Dell third. The largest application/industry segments by revenue in 2005 were university/academic research, followed by bio-sciences. DCC (digital content and distribution) has been growing rapidly, mainly because of the rise of virtual movies and online gaming. This segment now totals nearly half a billion dollars. The economics/financial segment has been around a long time and, at less than 5 percent of the HPC market, is not as large as some HPC vendors imply. About one-third of all HPC users are already looking at accelerator processors, predominantly FPGAs.

Paul Muzio, AHPCRC/NCSI, reviewed the HPC User Forum's role in identifying and helping to address issues of concern to the user community. The User Forum formulates a technical agenda around these concerns, brings in noted speakers, involves vendors, and encourages government agencies and others to pursue the issues. The User Forum has made important contributions regarding issues in benchmarking, ISV software and other areas. The organization's Steering Committee in recent meetings encouraged members to participate directly in standards committees important for the HPC industry.

Terry Hewitt said Manchester, founded in 1851, is the largest civic university in the UK. Among Manchester's contributions to computing are the first stored computer program and the first memory, based on cathode ray tube technology. Manchester also has a strong history in applications, such as medicine and anthropology, and in computing services within and beyond the university, including the UK's national data service and access grid support center. Manchester operates a Cray T3E, SGI Altix and a 2000-processor Dell for particle physics.

Martyn Guest of CCLRC Daresbury Laboratory discussed the UK's £38 million, three-phase (2006-2008), coordinated procurement of a variety of HPC systems to support 20 universities. Funds for the HPC procurement, part of the £900 million SRIF3 (Science Research Investment Fund) budget for "research capital," are entirely for equipment and infrastructure, with no funding for staff. Funds will be awarded to universities, which can then decide how much to spend on what (e.g., computers, networking, facilities). Daresbury got involved because the universities have limited expertise in procuring large HPC machines. Daresbury recommended, and helped assemble, a core set of benchmarks that combine synthetics and real applications.

Ben Ralston talked about the Atomic Weapons Establishment's (AWE) recent procurement that resulted in a win for a 40-teraflop Cray XT3 system. AWE's very demanding application helps maintain the UK's deterrent. The new system boosts sustained performance 25x, even though peak performance rose only 14x. The system will have 3,944 nodes of dual-core Opterons at 2.6 GHz. AWE expects to fully commission the system over the next few weeks. The benchmarks represented AWE users' codes (physics, engineering, material science) and results were weighted according to how heavily each codes is used at AWE. The tests were run on up to 4,096 processing elements.

Sharan Kalwani of General Motors, said he's looking at getting a 40-teraflop system soon. GM owns many other firms and needs to act in a global way, not as a collection of "islands." HPC plays a key role in quality and touches many aspects of GM's business: customer satisfaction, crash safety, NVH and more. Using HPC, GM has reduced its Vehicle Development Process from 80 months in the early 1990s to under 18 months in 2004, with further reductions planned. He estimates HPC has saved GM $1 billion. The company plans to grow to 60 teraflops of capacity plus capability within two years.

According to Martin Walker at Hewlett Packard, processor manufacturers are responding to requirements for more performance, and devices such as Intel's teraflop processor will be very interesting for petascale computing. We have ten years to construct the petaflop ecosystem. Which applications will need this? One potential area is biomedical research. It would take a petaflop system three years to simulate the folding process of a single protein. Using an HP system, EPFL and several Swiss universities are working to develop a vaccine to stimulate the immune system to kill cancer cells, with promising results in human trials.

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