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April 25, 2008
HPC Innovation in the Era of 'Good Enough'
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Stephen Wheat, senior director of HPC at Intel, gave a presentation at last month's HPCC Conference in Newport that had a lot of people talking. Wheat started with an overview of where the world's largest chip manufacturer is headed and the challenges they'll face getting there. But what sparked conversation were his closing comments on the state of the HPC industry and the risks for the future of HPC as a separate market.
The problem is one of identity. "Fewer and fewer HPC deployment activities are bearing any portion of the research and development costs of the market," Wheat said in a recent conversation. If high performance computing wants to continue to be a distinguishable market space, it needs its own research and development activities.
There are two forces working against robust R&D in HPC. First, investment in research for high end computation has remained lackluster even while industry groups and a series of blue ribbon government panels have repeatedly identified the need for increased funding and coordination. Without external funding for computation-centric R&D, vendors in HPC have been left to fund innovation on business margins alone.
By itself, this change isn't obviously bad. Lots of industries run their R&D off the business, right?
Except that HPC has also experienced a dramatic shift in the economics of its products and the dynamics of its customers. Over the past 10 years the ability to deploy a large number of FLOPS for an ever-decreasing price has created a FLOPS arms race. "In practice, the success of an installation is rarely measured by the performance of applications," Wheat says, "but by the Linpack performance of the solution."
Customers are often eager to be "on the list" or, lacking better tools and a vocabulary to talk about the effectiveness of a deployment in any other terms, simply focus on the one measure they can specify. Vendors who don't respond to this customer focus lose procurements, so prices get pushed down and designs are increasingly based on commodity technologies. One industry insider I talked to said that margins have fallen by as much as 300 percent on HPC hardware as commodity technologies have pushed farther into HPC.
You might be inclined to observe that prices wouldn't have fallen if companies hadn't responded the way they did, and you'd be right. And the pure free marketeers among you would rightly observe that markets get what they are willing to pay for; if there isn't funding for R&D, then just don't do any. The problem is that supercomputing isn't just any technology.
If consumers aren't willing to pay for the R&D needed to put that elusive sixth blade on the new Gillette shavers, everyone will get on just fine with their five-bladed wonders. But, as has been pointed out many times, supercomputing is a key enabling technology for much of the basic science that we are counting on to advance our society, from drugs to implants to cleaner sources of energy. As Dan Reed, now director of Scalable and Multicore Computing Strategy at Microsoft, pointed out in his testimony before Congress several years ago, high performance computing is a "universal intellectual amplifier." The problems that HPC faces -- software issues with million of threads, multicore tools and compilers, memory and I/O bandwidth, etc. -- need to be addressed in order for the other disciplines that depend upon computation to continue to thrive.
Dave Parry, senior vice president and product general manager at SGI, points out that one of the problems companies face in evaluating big procurements is in thinking of them as point events, and looking only at the costs of the specific systems offered. This excludes all the other costs a company needs to cover to keep the lights on and provide iced lattes to overworked engineers. A company might want to do this with one or two "marquee" procurements to claim a place at the top of the market. But when a large portion of a company's customers start demanding the same pricing, the balance sheets start tipping in the wrong direction.
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