Joining HP

I recently joined HP to help lead their HPC efforts.

This of course has caused a lot of people to ask why I joined HP and what my initial impressions are. So I thought I would use my first HP blog to talk about some of the things that attracted me here. First of all, I’m a big history fan, and HP has a long history of innovation in the world of HPC, including famed machines such as Sandia’s ASCI Q supercomputer which in 2002 reigned as the fastest supercomputer in the US and the #2 machine worldwide. While HP has hired a lot of new people since ASCI Q was built in 2002, I’m pleased to find that many of the employees involved in ASCI Q are still at HP, and still just as passionate as ever about HPC.

That passion for HPC is today resulting in some great new purpose-build HPC products like the recently introduced HP ProLiantSL390s G7 Server. I’m clearly not the only one who thinks so, some of the world’s leading HPC centers, like the Tokyo Institute of Technology are chosing HPC solutions from HP as Tokyo Tech’s Professor Satoshi Matsoaka discusses in this video. A little closer to home, at the University of Minnesota, another school long associated with great HPC innovations, an HP supercomputer is being used to advance the frontiers of science.

One of my first priorities at HP is simply to understand all the great things HP and it’s customers are already doing in the HPC field. Over the coming weeks and months, I’ll be helping to fine tune HP’s HPC strategy. But as much as is going on inside HP, I’ll also be looking outside. HP has one of the broadest range of commercial HPC partners in the world. I’m finding that if there is an HPC hardware or software innovation coming out of a partner in the next 6 to 18 months, HP is likely to already be working with that partner and have the innovation on its technology roadmap.

Of course, many of the challenges the HPC community faces in getting to sustainable, repeatable exascale by the end of the decade are not being addressed by commercial companies in the 18 month timeframe, but by national labs and university HPC centers looking out at the five to eight to ten year challenges. So I’ll be spending a fair part of my time looking at how HP can better partner with these centers to shape our long term plans.

Its exciting to be back working full time in the HPC space with so many HP employees, partners, and customers who share my passion. I’ll be blogging more here, but also hope to see many of you at SC10 in New Orleans next month as well as the HP Consortium for Advanced Scientific and Technical (HP-CAST) immediately prior to SC10.