High-performance computing deals with very high volume and throughput-information processing. Financial IT consultant Ray Ferrara at Fiducité examines HPC from a Windows-based perspective.
Once the domain of expensive, esoteric research projects, high-performance computing (HPC) today is becoming mainstream, paralleling industries like automobiles where techniques proven for the race track find their way to the family car, just as high-speed interconnects, look-ahead instruction caching, parallel compilers and debuggers and other artifacts of HPC are finding their way into financial industry computers.
As the need for robust, cost-effective approaches to HPC grows (we’re discovering more useful applications that require greater processing power, from real-time financial analysis and portfolio modeling, to data visualization and data mining, to ever larger and more comprehensive enterprise applications and data warehouses, to Web service farms supporting hundreds of concurrent transactions with sub-second response times), pricing for HPC configurations are falling as demand skyrockets. Major brands – Microsoft, Intel, Dell, Unisys, IBM – now offer some form of HPC with hundreds of tech firms delivering specialized solutions based on commodity chips, operating systems and interconnects.
In fact, the movement to lower-cost, commodity “piece parts” has been the most startling development since the 1990s. In HPC’s infancy, machines were custom built. By the late 80s to early 90s, the industry had evolved slowly with vendors producing limited quantities of vertically integrated HPC products based largely on components manufactured by the primary vendor, run by specialized operating systems. Of the 24 hardware vendors I covered in a September 1994 report at TowerGroup (“Parallel Processing in Banking”), only six survive now.
Today, a large number of vendors utilize a limited set of commodity parts, mainly Intel CISC chipsets and industry standard interconnects. Much of the software integration for loosely coupled systems is coming via standard software toolkits and drivers that enable the various components to function as a complete HPC system.
HPC and Windows
Not surprisingly, there’s been an increasing use of Intel chip sets in HPC, given Intel’s market dominance and price/performance improvements. Similarly, if you expected Microsoft’s Windows operating systems, at least NT-2000-2003 Server versions, to be a mainstay of the HPC community, since Windows runs on all the hot commodity chips used in HPC, particularly Intel’s 32-bit Pentium/Xeon chips and new 64-bit Itanium chips, you would be right. Powerful HPC systems have been built on the Windows platform, especially for commercially-available, symmetric-multiprocessing solutions.
At the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC), Windows-based machines now claim 12 of the top 14 current TPC-W performance records for structured inquiry performance against databases. Windows-based solutions also hold a significant percentage of the benchmarks for TPC-C (transaction processing) and TPC-H (ad-hoc decision support) performed on off-the-shelf machine configurations.
At supercomputing’s high end, where many machines are still custom assembled, there has been Windows platform development activity at Cornell Theory Center, an interdisciplinary research center at Cornell University with an office on Wall Street, which built a Windows-based supercomputer on Dell hardware, ranking among the top 100 fastest supercomputers according to the independent “Top 500” supercomputer rating agency (www.top500.org). Seoul National University in Korea has also assembled a Dell/Windows supercomputer. It is a tad less powerful than Cornell’s.
Coming on fast and noteworthy, HPC Windows solutions are a much more viable choice in financial industry environments where the advantages of a common, integrated infrastructure from desktop to data center to Web services can be achieved, and where commercially-available, industrial-strength, symmetric-multiprocessing database servers are needed to support extensive production workloads.
About the Author: A veteran industry writer and consultant for IDC, Auerbach and TowerGroup, Ray Ferrara is currently CEO of Fiducité, www.fiducité.com, which specializes in custom market research and technology due diligence reporting for financial industry clients. Ken West, president, Advanced Internet Architects, Spokane, WA, contributed to this article.
by Ray Ferrara