Data Analytics has allowed us to achieve groundbreaking scientific advancements in the IT industry. While Data Analysis is about collecting and analyzing enormous amounts of data pertaining to a particular field, extremely high computational power is required to make it happen.
While normal computers like personal laptops or desktops are capable of performing around 3 billion calculations per second, a supercomputer can perform quadrillions of calculations per second.
Anjus George is an HPC expert and one of the people behind operationalizing ‘Frontier’, the world’s fastest supercomputer. She explains — “these supercomputers that form a subset of High Performance Computing are used for data-intensive and computation-heavy scientific and engineering purposes such as quantum mechanics, weather forecasting, oil and gas exploration, molecular modeling and other complex applications”
Anjus is a Ph.D. in Distributed Systems for the IoT-Edge and she contributed majorly in coming up with the Lustre code, an open-source, parallel file system that supports many requirements of leadership class HPC simulation environments.She is also one of the authors of “Understanding Lustre File System Internals“, a technical manual written to support Lustredevelopers across the industry.
High Performance Computing assimilates thousands of computer resources and deploys parallel processing to run complex application programmes consistently. Sectors including government, defense, energy, academic, and utility have fallen subject to the proliferated need of High Performance Computing systems as well.
High Performance Computing finds its application in the development of complex digitala enterprises including high-frequency trading, computer-aided design, computational fluid dynamics, genomics-based personalized medicine, speech and facial recognition, autonomous vehicles, deep learning, pattern recognition, seismic exploration, and seismic tomography.
As per HPCWire and Hyperion Research, the global high performance computing market size reached a value of USD 44.5 billion in 2023. The market grew at a CAGR of around 7% in the forecast period of 2015-2024, to reach a value of around USD 50 billion by 2024.
HPC solutions can be implemented on premise, in the cloud, or in a hybrid model that involves some of each. In on-premise HPC implementation, an organization needs to set up an in-house HPC cluster comprising servers, storage systems, and other necessary infrastructure, elaborates George.
Anjus shares with us what makes High Performance Computing systems so essential in today’s IT scenario, and for the future we are headed towards:
Innovation: HPC systems process data that’s substantial in both size and significance. The results and insights obtained at such a level naturally drive innovation in product design, management practices, scientific research, etc.
Sheer speed and efficiency: Processing times are reduced to minutes from weeks or even months with High Performance Computing. HPCs fastrack testing processes, thus eliminating the need for physical testing. HPCs are powerful enough to simulate real-world scenarios like vehicular accidents to gain data without having to conduct crash tests.
Cost reduction: One of the greatest precedences with HPC solutions are their cost and resource effectiveness. With HPC systems implemented through cloud computing, medium and even small businesses can afford to extract use out of them. Scalability of HPC integration is an added advantage here.
Fortune 1000 companies in nearly every industry employ HPC, with even upper-middle level businesses looking forward to adopting HPC solutions to harness data analytics on another level.
Some top global companies that actively extract extensive use of HPCs include HP, Dell, NVIDIA, Microsoft, IBM, Intel, and Cisco, among others. Particularly major use-cases of HPC systems entail Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, Research in aerospace, Oil and gas, Finance Technology (real-time stock trading and automation), Healthcare, Media and entertainment.
Commenting on the future of HPC, Anjus George shares that as cloud computing gets more powerful and reliable, cloud-based HPCs deployments will reach much more businesses equitably. As HPC clusters rise in terms of accessibility, it shall only result in greater exposure for innovation across industries.
