PayPal Finds Order from Chaos with HPC

By Tiffany Trader

September 24, 2014

At the 2014 HPC User Forum in Seattle, Ryan Quick and Arno Kolster from PayPal describe how the company is using HPC to transform its chaotic real-time server data into intelligent, actionable insight. The unique “Systems Intelligence” approach uses HP’s Moonshot server powered by TI processors to aggregate, analyze and act on transaction data in real time.

The goal for PayPal is to detect patterns and anomalies and take action upon those before the user experience is negatively impacted. The main challenge is doing this in real-time as PayPal needs to process some 3 million events every second from thousands of sources in its datacenter. Source events include application logs, machine data, environmental data from the datacenters, and social media events. There is about 25 Tb of data coming in per hour, 20 Mb per second of machine data from thousands of PayPal servers, some 50,000 metadata relationships, and an ever-increasing tide of social media trends and customer interactions to consider.

“We basically take all that data, put it all together and correlate events across those streams,” says Kolster, Senior MTS, Database Architect, PayPal. “For instance if we put out a release out on Thursday night in San Jose, and a few minutes later we notice an increase in customer interactions in Dublin and Twitter feeds in Germany saying this latest release in PayPal isn’t working correctly, we can now correlate all three events within seconds, whereas before it would take several hours for people to understand what was happening.”

The Systems Intelligence flow architecture shares many similarities with a PayPal fraud detection system that was also built on HPC principles. It’s fairly simplistic, says Kolster, but when it gets down to the actual deployment, it becomes much more complex. All the source event data gets thrown on a huge bus in real time and ingested by app servers, which are doing inline processing. There are complex event processors on each of those application servers, and a huge shared memory event window with the SGI UV2000. The event stream is augmented with offline databases, both relational and graph databases. The machine learning element pushes new models back into the application servers. An alerting and notification system is used for problem remediation.

PayPal’s exploration of HPC started as far back as 2006. As Ryan Quick, Principal Architect in the Advanced Technology Group at PayPal, explains, “Our job is looking at the next best thing.” Quick and Kolster started shopping in HPC because they had a set of problems, especially around real-time, that weren’t being met by the tools they could acquire from their regular channels.

m800-hp-moonshot-200x207“There’s a weird gray area where your needs aren’t being met in the enterprise, but HPC is still a little too bleeding-edge,” adds Quick.

In discussing how they decided upon the HP-TI platform, Quick recalls looking at Kolster and saying, “what they’ve done here is build an HPC cluster and they put it on a system on a chip.” The KeyStone multicore processors provided a powerful combination of four ARM Cortex-A15 cores, eight C66x DSPs, plus internal fabric and networking capabilities.

As partner TI explains, the 66AK2Hx SoC running in HP’s Moonshot platform possesses some unique advantages to aid in real time processing. These include:

1) C66x DSP cores that have great signal processing performance as well as very low latency response times and can receive, process, and return packet data very quickly.
2) An integrated I/O fabric that moves data quickly and with low latency. The C66AK2H IO fabric utilizes sRIO that has 10x lower hop to hop latency than Ethernet I/O.
3) Additional KeyStone II architecture elements such as the Multicore Navigator and TeraNet which further enable low latency data movement within and across devices.

TIS_KeyStone_iconThe new platform essentially treats Complex Event Processing as Digital Signals. “You turn the data into a signal that can be analyzed in hardware,” says Quick. And with eight DSPs, they can ingest many signals at once and then pattern recognize against all of them simultaneously. The system is also quite efficient: it runs at 55 watts per cartridge (4 SoCs/cartridge) and delivers an impressive 11.2 gigaflops-per-watt. As a point of comparison, the most energy-efficient supercomputer in the world as per the most recent edition of the Green500 list – TSUBAME-KFC in Japan – offers a more modest 4.4 gigaflops-per-watt.

The application is currently available to the public through TI. The product includes OpenCL, the full development kit and the software.

Subscribe to HPCwire's Weekly Update!

Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industry updates delivered to you every week!

Empowering High-Performance Computing for Artificial Intelligence

April 19, 2024

Artificial intelligence (AI) presents some of the most challenging demands in information technology, especially concerning computing power and data movement. As a result of these challenges, high-performance computing Read more…

Kathy Yelick on Post-Exascale Challenges

April 18, 2024

With the exascale era underway, the HPC community is already turning its attention to zettascale computing, the next of the 1,000-fold performance leaps that have occurred about once a decade. With this in mind, the ISC Read more…

2024 Winter Classic: Texas Two Step

April 18, 2024

Texas Tech University. Their middle name is ‘tech’, so it’s no surprise that they’ve been fielding not one, but two teams in the last three Winter Classic cluster competitions. Their teams, dubbed Matador and Red Read more…

2024 Winter Classic: The Return of Team Fayetteville

April 18, 2024

Hailing from Fayetteville, NC, Fayetteville State University stayed under the radar in their first Winter Classic competition in 2022. Solid students for sure, but not a lot of HPC experience. All good. They didn’t Read more…

Software Specialist Horizon Quantum to Build First-of-a-Kind Hardware Testbed

April 18, 2024

Horizon Quantum Computing, a Singapore-based quantum software start-up, announced today it would build its own testbed of quantum computers, starting with use of Rigetti’s Novera 9-qubit QPU. The approach by a quantum Read more…

2024 Winter Classic: Meet Team Morehouse

April 17, 2024

Morehouse College? The university is well-known for their long list of illustrious graduates, the rigor of their academics, and the quality of the instruction. They were one of the first schools to sign up for the Winter Read more…

Kathy Yelick on Post-Exascale Challenges

April 18, 2024

With the exascale era underway, the HPC community is already turning its attention to zettascale computing, the next of the 1,000-fold performance leaps that ha Read more…

Software Specialist Horizon Quantum to Build First-of-a-Kind Hardware Testbed

April 18, 2024

Horizon Quantum Computing, a Singapore-based quantum software start-up, announced today it would build its own testbed of quantum computers, starting with use o Read more…

MLCommons Launches New AI Safety Benchmark Initiative

April 16, 2024

MLCommons, organizer of the popular MLPerf benchmarking exercises (training and inference), is starting a new effort to benchmark AI Safety, one of the most pre Read more…

Exciting Updates From Stanford HAI’s Seventh Annual AI Index Report

April 15, 2024

As the AI revolution marches on, it is vital to continually reassess how this technology is reshaping our world. To that end, researchers at Stanford’s Instit Read more…

Intel’s Vision Advantage: Chips Are Available Off-the-Shelf

April 11, 2024

The chip market is facing a crisis: chip development is now concentrated in the hands of the few. A confluence of events this week reminded us how few chips Read more…

The VC View: Quantonation’s Deep Dive into Funding Quantum Start-ups

April 11, 2024

Yesterday Quantonation — which promotes itself as a one-of-a-kind venture capital (VC) company specializing in quantum science and deep physics  — announce Read more…

Nvidia’s GTC Is the New Intel IDF

April 9, 2024

After many years, Nvidia's GPU Technology Conference (GTC) was back in person and has become the conference for those who care about semiconductors and AI. I Read more…

Google Announces Homegrown ARM-based CPUs 

April 9, 2024

Google sprang a surprise at the ongoing Google Next Cloud conference by introducing its own ARM-based CPU called Axion, which will be offered to customers in it Read more…

Nvidia H100: Are 550,000 GPUs Enough for This Year?

August 17, 2023

The GPU Squeeze continues to place a premium on Nvidia H100 GPUs. In a recent Financial Times article, Nvidia reports that it expects to ship 550,000 of its lat Read more…

Synopsys Eats Ansys: Does HPC Get Indigestion?

February 8, 2024

Recently, it was announced that Synopsys is buying HPC tool developer Ansys. Started in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1970 as Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. (SASI) by John Swanson (and eventually renamed), Ansys serves the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering)/multiphysics engineering simulation market. Read more…

Intel’s Server and PC Chip Development Will Blur After 2025

January 15, 2024

Intel's dealing with much more than chip rivals breathing down its neck; it is simultaneously integrating a bevy of new technologies such as chiplets, artificia Read more…

Choosing the Right GPU for LLM Inference and Training

December 11, 2023

Accelerating the training and inference processes of deep learning models is crucial for unleashing their true potential and NVIDIA GPUs have emerged as a game- Read more…

Baidu Exits Quantum, Closely Following Alibaba’s Earlier Move

January 5, 2024

Reuters reported this week that Baidu, China’s giant e-commerce and services provider, is exiting the quantum computing development arena. Reuters reported � Read more…

Comparing NVIDIA A100 and NVIDIA L40S: Which GPU is Ideal for AI and Graphics-Intensive Workloads?

October 30, 2023

With long lead times for the NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs, many organizations are looking at the new NVIDIA L40S GPU, which it’s a new GPU optimized for AI and g Read more…

Shutterstock 1179408610

Google Addresses the Mysteries of Its Hypercomputer 

December 28, 2023

When Google launched its Hypercomputer earlier this month (December 2023), the first reaction was, "Say what?" It turns out that the Hypercomputer is Google's t Read more…

AMD MI3000A

How AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat

October 5, 2023

When discussing GenAI, the term "GPU" almost always enters the conversation and the topic often moves toward performance and access. Interestingly, the word "GPU" is assumed to mean "Nvidia" products. (As an aside, the popular Nvidia hardware used in GenAI are not technically... Read more…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

Shutterstock 1606064203

Meta’s Zuckerberg Puts Its AI Future in the Hands of 600,000 GPUs

January 25, 2024

In under two minutes, Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, laid out the company's AI plans, which included a plan to build an artificial intelligence system with the eq Read more…

China Is All In on a RISC-V Future

January 8, 2024

The state of RISC-V in China was discussed in a recent report released by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The report, entitled "E Read more…

Shutterstock 1285747942

AMD’s Horsepower-packed MI300X GPU Beats Nvidia’s Upcoming H200

December 7, 2023

AMD and Nvidia are locked in an AI performance battle – much like the gaming GPU performance clash the companies have waged for decades. AMD has claimed it Read more…

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, codenamed Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from Read more…

DoD Takes a Long View of Quantum Computing

December 19, 2023

Given the large sums tied to expensive weapon systems – think $100-million-plus per F-35 fighter – it’s easy to forget the U.S. Department of Defense is a Read more…

Eyes on the Quantum Prize – D-Wave Says its Time is Now

January 30, 2024

Early quantum computing pioneer D-Wave again asserted – that at least for D-Wave – the commercial quantum era has begun. Speaking at its first in-person Ana Read more…

GenAI Having Major Impact on Data Culture, Survey Says

February 21, 2024

While 2023 was the year of GenAI, the adoption rates for GenAI did not match expectations. Most organizations are continuing to invest in GenAI but are yet to Read more…

The GenAI Datacenter Squeeze Is Here

February 1, 2024

The immediate effect of the GenAI GPU Squeeze was to reduce availability, either direct purchase or cloud access, increase cost, and push demand through the roof. A secondary issue has been developing over the last several years. Even though your organization secured several racks... Read more…

  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire