HPCwire: Michael Dell Talks HPC

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November 18, 2008

Michael Dell Talks HPC

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Dell founder and CEO Michael Dell delivered the keynote address at the Supercomputing conference this morning in Austin, Texas, offering his perspective on where high performance computing is headed. We caught up with Dell shortly before the conference to get a preview of the keynote and to ask him about some of the hot-button issues that are driving the HPC industry today.

HPCwire: We're almost certainly going to be in a recession in the U.S. and perhaps much of the world for the immediate future. How do you think that changes the HPC market? Or does it?

Michael Dell: You'll likely see an impact on funding. The global economic challenge is affecting every sector of society and business. It will place an even greater premium on productivity and efficiency -- doing more with less. The democratization of supercomputing might even be accelerated as researchers and scientists take advantage of standards-based platforms to share compute capacity.

It's likely we will see some consolidation in the IT sector -- so decisions being made today need to be considered carefully. Dell is well positioned -- with $9 billion in the bank -- to provide needed stability here.

We can't forget that supercomputing drives our competitiveness. Without it our economies don't grow and some of the world's most pressing challenges won't get solved. Problems like advancing fusion power for more affordable and accessible energy and developing nanofiltration techniques that remove pollutants from water. Today, just one in six people worldwide has access to clean water. We must continue to invest in supercomputing capacity.

HPCwire: After more than 20 years, high-performance computing is certainly an established market. Yet the conventional wisdom is that a lot of demand goes unserved. What do you think has been holding back more users from tapping into HPC?

Dell: For too long, supercomputing was about proprietary technology. As a result, it was also about high cost.

And there were those who wanted to maintain an air of exclusivity. You can trace that back to the days of specialized processors and proprietary operating systems like Illiac IV and Cray 1. Things got a little better in the 1980s and 1990s.

But the real changes have come in the past decade during which the supercomputing community has really embraced open-source and standards. That's clear when you look at what's happened on the TOP500.

It's rewarding to see that play out in broader access. You now have far more engineers, scientists and researchers worldwide focused on solving society's biggest problems, which are also computational challenges.

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