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July 10, 2008
Acceleware Offers GPU-Flavored HPC
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Market analysts are predicting big things for HPC. As growth in the rest of the server industry flattens out, they see HPC continuing to expand. Most of this growth is at the bottom, and the vision is one of many new customers stepping up to buy clusters of 16, 32, or 64 nodes costing less than $50,000.
It's a believable vision, but one with serious obstacles to overcome. HPC is hard -- inexcusably so. In a blog post several weeks ago, Tabor Research analyst Chris Willard passed on one of the many definitions of the term "supercomputer" he has heard over the years: "Any computer where the compute time is worth more than the programmer time." This is a pervasive definition that has worked its way deep into our thinking about HPC. It is also totally wrong-headed.
Another obstacle to broad entry-level adoption of HPC is change: the technologies of HPC evolve faster than most of the vendors of the software tools that are driving low-end HPC adoption can keep up with. Cost is another problem; although costs of hardware are falling and have fallen dramatically, they are still out of the reach of much of the small enterprises that could make use of HPC, and the entry path often isn't a smooth slope. One is either using a $5,000 workstation or a $100,000 cluster. Until recently, there hasn't been much in the middle, and the offerings are still pretty thin.
Finally, the very people who need to buy the computers to fulfill the visions of dramatic HPC growth do not identify with HPC, or supercomputing, as solutions to their problems. They are a "dark market." So HPC has to find them, in small corners of very diverse markets, and find a way to sell to them that will cause the vast new market at the bottom of the HPC customer pyramid to finally take shape and start making actual purchases.
Acceleware's strategy is to to bring HPC to a diverse set of customers, one vertical at a time. I recently spoke with Ryan Schneider, Acceleware's CTO, and Robert Miller, the vice president of marketing and product management, about the company, its technology, and its approach to the market.
Acceleware's technology is software deployed on top of NVIDIA's GPUs and HP's servers. Although the company doesn't manufacture the hardware, it does intense integration with the result that it owns the entire solution delivered to a customer, from silicon to application software. The company works with ISVs in a vertical to modify the key software tools in that domain in order to take advantage of GPU acceleration using Acceleware's middleware, the "Acceleware Technology Platform." Right now Acceleware has offerings in virtual prototyping, imaging, and the oil and gas industries.
There may be a lot of code work done under the hood, but the users continue to work with their favorite software using their familiar UIs and workflows without disruption. The only change users will see is something akin to a checkbox asking whether they want to run their simulation with acceleration, or not. That's it.
What's the payoff? For users it can be tremendous. They buy hardware in a familiar workstation form factor or as one of the smaller C30 clusters, running the same OS and applications they've already run. The unit comes ready to plug in, totally configured with their domain application software licensed and ready to run. And they get performance advantages that can be significant. For example, cell phone manufacturers using Acceleware's kit have seen turnaround times decrease from 10 hours per simulation run -- in an analysis suite that typically requires 400 runs -- to 15 minutes. Medical providers using Acceleware's imaging kit for reconstruction of medical image data have seen their run times shrink from a month to a few days, and a large drug company saw their imaging workflow shrink from a week to a few hours.
What's the motivation for ISVs to work with Acceleware? Ryan Schneider, Acceleware's CTO, described it as a build-versus-buy value proposition for these companies. For the most part, the software companies Acceleware works with have limited resources that are focused very tightly in their application domain writing the software their users want. Porting to Acceleware's middleware allows companies to insulate themselves from technology change risk. As new technologies replace or augment GPU acceleration as viable alternatives in technical computing, Acceleware simply adds support for the new hardware underneath the middleware layer.
The relationship with the software vendors gives Acceleware direct access to what would otherwise be a dark market at the low end. Acceleware sells directly into the verticals they are targeting, augmenting channel sales driven by the ISVs.
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