HPCwire: Database Vendor Versant Eyes HPC Market

Since 1986 - Covering the Fastest Computers in the World and the People Who Run Them

HPCwire >> Features

September 29, 2009

Database Vendor Versant Eyes HPC Market

by John West, for HPCwire

Page: 1 of 2
1 | 2 All »

Object database maker Versant has done pretty well in its market niche, with a list of 1,500 customers that includes well-known names like AT&T, Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, and British Airways. With 80 people, a market cap of $65 million USD, and revenue last year of $25 million, Versant is a small company by most any measure. But it is in a small industry: while the relational database business is valued around $10 billion a year these days, the object database market is on the order of only a couple hundred million dollars a year.

A niche product for a niche market, Versant's core technology isn't needed everywhere, but it is indispensable where it is needed. And the company is hoping to demonstrate that at least some HPC users need it.

Alright, first things first: what's an object database? Object databases provide persistent storage for, well, objects. Imagine you have a backpack object, and that backpack has a flashlight object and a rope object in it. When you retrieve the backpack object out of the database you get the flashlight and the rope along with it, no extra queries required (well, actually you probably get pointers to those objects, but that's a detail).

With a relational database, data is stored in rows and columns in (probably many) tables in your database. In our backpack example all backpacks may be listed in a specific table, with each given a unique ID. Another table may store the various camp tools, like ropes and flashlights, that campers may put in backpacks. And yet a third table would put these together, with one row holding the ID for our backpack and the flashlight, and another row holding the ID for our backpack again and the rope.

The mechanics of retrieval offer an important distinction with the relational model: unlike a relational database wherein programmers have to structure a database request (query) in a separate language called SQL, an object database works in the context of a regular programming language such as C++, C or Java. So, for the object database, a programmer calls the backpack object into memory and it comes along with (pointers to) the flashlight and rope objects. But a programmer using a relational database would constructuct a SQL query that first pulled all of the records from the third table to find all the entries that are associated with our backpack's ID. Then he'd have to construct other queries to look in the camp tool tables to find out what kinds of tools were attached to those IDs.

Despite the apparent added headaches of working with SQL and a relational database, they can be very (very) fast in a wide variety of applications, and have been proven to scale to enormous sizes. They are ubiquitous in nearly every enterprise, and you probably have a bunch in your own HPC center for managing inventory, user tickets, and so on. On the other hand, there are well-documented situations in which object databases are not only easier for a developer to deal with, they are much faster than the alternatives.

"Complexity and concurrency are the two things that we look for in application profiles that would lend themselves well to an object-oriented database," says David Ingersoll, Versant's VP of sales (Americas and APAC).

Of course, in traditional high performance technical computing, the choices aren't between relational and object databases. The choices are between using any kind of database at all and flat files. And Ingersoll acknowledges this is a key obstacle they face in talking with clients, "One challenge is just to get people to realize that they need a database and not just a filesystem."

But he isn't coming to HPC empty-handed. When he briefed us about Versant's potential in the HPC space, Ingersoll talked about examples of traditional HPC users using Versant's object databases in HPC applications today; particularly, applications with large streaming data. For example, the Air Force Weather Agency uses a Versant database to store real-time satellite imagery that is then fed into computational models for cloud forecasts. Other similar applications include the European Space Agency's Herschel Space Observatory, where Versant is the mission database, and Verizon, where real-time call data are streamed into a hierarchical set of databases that are used for near real-time fraud detection.

Exxon Mobil is also using Versant's technology in its reservoir simulation system, EMPower. In its application, results from large-scale numerical simulations are stored in the database and then subjected to analytics routines that answer questions about where to place wells, when and where to inject fluids, and so forth.

Page: 1 of 2
1 | 2 All »

Article Tools

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Subscribe

Subscribe to HPCwire

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Around the Web

Picking the Right Processor

Sep 03 | Should engineers take advantage of GPU computing? Read more...

HP, Hynix Start Memristor on Path to Commercialization

Sep 02 | Could see first products in three years. Read more...

TED Talks for the IT Crowd

Sep 01 | A hand-picked selection of video presentations from the TED conference -- because the next big thing has to start somewhere. Read more...

LHC Compute Grid Teaches Some Valuble Lessons

Aug 30 | CERN project adapts its computation and storage strategy as hardware gets cheaper and better. Read more...

Godson CPUs Groomed for Supercomputing Duty

Aug 26 | Chinese-made chip adds vector SIMD unit; delivers 128 gigaflops in 40 watts. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Effective Backup and Restore

Jul 29 | | Panasas storage solutions deliver high throughput with many concurrent backup IO streams to standard backup applications such as Veritas NetBackup™ or EMC® NetWorker™. Download this whitepaper to understand the essential elements for effective backup and restore: the tape subsystem, networking, file system workload and administrative policy.

GPU Cluster Realities Whitepaper from Platform Computing

Jul 28 | | As compelling economics and performance drive GPUs into HPC clusters, developers are scrambling to catch up. Download this whitepaper from Platform Computing to understand how to capture the benefits of exciting new GPU capabilities.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Are you drowning in data?

In this webinar you will hear about the current storage challenges facing the HPC community, how Panasas storage solutions provide exceptional performance, scalability, and manageability, and how you can achieve the lowest total Cost of Ownership with a system that installs and configures in 15 minutes.

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.