HPCwire: Platform Computing CEO Looks to the Year Ahead

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February 01, 2008

Platform Computing CEO Looks to the Year Ahead

by Cheryl Doninger & Charles Coleman, Ph.D, SAS Institute Inc.

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Songnian Zhou, CEO of Platform Computing, is widely recognized as a pioneer of grid computing. His Ph.D. thesis established the field of distributed resources management and was the catalyst for the creation of Platform. An accomplished businessman, Songnian has built up Platform from a company of three employees to one that is 400-strong, and has 15 offices around the globe.

In this interview, SAS Institute's Cheryl Doninger asks him his thoughts on how HPC and grid technology are evolving and how that's driving user adoption and vendor opportunities.

Cheryl Doninger: What are your thoughts on how the industry has progressed in the last year?

Songnian Zhou: The HPC industry continued to grow and mature in 2007. This is driven by the maturing and expanding set of compute or data intensive applications. Clusters of commodity computers are ideal for most of these applications to scale out to tackle larger problems, with more accurate results, and in less time. The dramatic reduction in hardware costs compared to proprietary SMP and vector architectures led to rapidly expanding adoption of HPC systems and increase in not only node count, but also vendor revenue. This is a positive feedback loop of a successful market delivering compelling business value.

One sign of progress for this industry is the increasing expectation of integrated systems with not only the hardware but also management software delivered to end users, ready to run their applications. This is in sharp contrast to the "build your own" clusters of 5 or 10 years ago. Another sign is the build-out of technical data centers based on an enterprise grid architecture of integrated clusters. Such centrally managed systems are shared by users across a large organization and managed professionally to ensure availability and low cost.

Doninger: What opportunities and challenges will the industry face in 2008?

Zhou: With the flattening of processor speed and the complexity of multicore, how can the industry continue to meet the insatiable demand for computing power without introducing a lot of complexity? There is no single universal solution. Ironically, just as the industry converges on a set of standard technologies such as x86 processors, Ethernet and InfiniBand switches, and Linux and Windows OSes, it starts to diverge to a variety of technologies such as multicore, GPU, FPGA, and Cell processor. They can be a programming nightmare. There is more need than ever for application middleware and management software to hide the complexity of such technologies from programmers and users while exposing their power. Opportunities and challenges come in equal measure in such a changing market.

An opportunity and challenge beyond programming models is to provide emerging HPC users with simple, easy to deploy and use HPC environments. New HPC users with demands for increased processing power for their compute and data intensive applications are not experts in building and managing clusters, they are looking for turnkey solutions that just work.

Doninger: What should we be doing as (HPC/grid) hardware and software vendors to promote and help facilitate broader adoption of the technology?

Zhou: The components of the HPC stack need to fit and work together to deliver what users care about the most: ease of adoption, ease of use, and low cost of ownership. ISV's need to develop applications and solutions that easily exploit cluster environments. SAS, for example, leads the market for enabling grid and cluster capabilities in their business intelligence and predictive analytics software. This speaks to the increasing value of grid adoption in just about any industry. As the number of business applications that can leverage HPC clusters grows, executives begin to see greater value in the clusters beyond their established space in engineering departments and financial analysis. So, the vendors need to cooperate to ensure their products interoperate. For example, that the applications are certified to run in the clusters users want to use, and the scheduling and cluster management software is fully tested with the OS and hardware. In the end, a cluster should be as simple as an SMP server with OS and management software fully tested and ready for applications. I call such an HPC cluster a "cluster server", as it really should be a low cost and scalable server. Vendor cooperation and product integration is best done based on industry standards and open interfaces; otherwise, the combination of various components to be integrated will explode. The HPC Basic Profile developed with the support of Open Grid Forum is an example of such standard development. The Intel Cluster Ready program is an example of initiatives to ease the certification and adoption of cluster servers.

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