"Roadmap For HPC Solutions Can Help CIOs"

In today’s day and age, the use of HPC technology is no longer limited to science and research and development projects. HPC has been adopted by several verticals including media, animation and financial services. SMBs in India also now seem ready to embrace this technology. Pallavi Kathuria, director, Server Business Group, Microsoft India, talks to Biztech2.0 about the latest trends in the HPC space.

How mature is the High Performance Computing (HPC) market in India? What are the latest trends in this market?

Earlier, science and research projects were using HPC technologies due to the high processing capacities they offered. However, today, as enterprises across industries demand faster ways of doing business, HPC solutions have become a common technology deployment that equips organisations with higher processing power. Initially, companies were a little hesitant to go in for HPC technologies due to their price but now the market has warmed up and there is an emerging trend of HPC users. As a related change, one can observe a growing usage of commodity components in processors, interconnects etc. Industry analysts peg that the factory revenue for the HPC market grew a full 18 percent compared to last year, reaching $3 billion in 3Q07.

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Could you please comment on the use of HPC in traditional verticals like defence versus other segments today?

HPC technologies were traditionally used for the engineering, research and defence sectors. However, now with the availability of a wide variety of solutions in this category and decreasing costs, non-traditional sectors are also showing high interest towards the adoption of HPC to make their business more competitive.

Today, HPC has indeed evolved beyond its conventional realms of utility to include a wide range of modern technologies such as storage, networking, data management and others. With the aim of combating the high costs involved in deploying HPC solutions, Microsoft has taken a leap in introducing the cost advantage, ease of use and ready partner ecosystem for HPC solutions that will allow the mainstream commercial industry and public sector units to reap the benefits of this technology.

Animation, media and entertainment companies today face unprecedented opportunities in the markets they serve. The rapid shift from analog to digital creation and the ensuing management and distribution of content has opened many doors for these industries, thereby increasing the pressure on them to enhance their rendering capabilities. In the media industry specifically, HPC is driving the requirements for faster and more efficient render farms. The fast expanding demand for digital content and animation have also triggered the adoption of HPC solutions in this industry. Apart from this, financial services, oil and gas companies and some public sector units dealing with bioinformatics and weather forecasting are also embracing HPC technologies.

What is your advice for CIOs planning to go in for HPC technologies?

These CIOs should consider commodity components and standardised offerings, when looking for HPC solutions. Now a days, a wide variety of solutions is available in this segment and prices have also gone down. Moving beyond large enterprises, even SMEs can embrace these technologies if their businesses need them. CIOs should prepare a roadmap before going in for HPC solutions. Evaluating such a roadmap and choosing the right partner is very important for any organisation.

Do you think Indian SMBs are ready to adopt HPC technologies?

The adoption of HPC among SMBs in India has already started. SMBs, which earlier used to outsource such capability requirements, are now increasingly looking at setting up cluster computing facilities themselves. This is expected to provide a competitive edge, help serve global customers better and bring in a faster time to insight. Today, usage of commodity components makes it possible for SMBs to afford such solutions.

Moreover, standardised platform solutions from Microsoft like the Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 along with standard ISV offerings, ensure that customers can spend more time on their business requirements rather than troubleshooting IT infrastructure.