OK, OK, I know, too long without a blog update. It has been a busy two months. I’ve been spending a LOT of time on the road, meeting with HPC customers, one thing I never get tired of. I’m often asked by people outside of the supercomputer community why I’m always so excited and passionate about HPC. The answer is simple, everywhere around us supercomputing is being used to make it matter. From helping to develop new life saving drugs to discovering possible new solutions to greenhouse gases.
Increasingly, almost every HPC discussion I have also includes the topic of “Big Data”. It isn’t to hard to figure out why. Using just one example, Life Technologies desktop Ion Proton 1 sequencer generates about 150 GB/day of data today. Next year’s Ion Proton 2 is expected to generate about 600 GB/day of data. All of that needs to be stored and analyzed. Other companies are producing sequencers with similar data rates. And if the desktop Ion Proton 1 is too big for you, Oxford Nanopore is developing a sequencer about the size of a USB thumb drive that plus into a laptop. Those and thousands of other new sensors and devices are producing an ever increasing flood of data that is growing significantly faster than Moore’s law.
HP has long been a provider of Hadoop infrastructure to many of the world’s leading search, social networking, and ecommerce companies and today HP’s Hadoop solutions include not only HP servers, storage, and networking, but reference architectures for some of the leading Hadoop commercial distributions including Cloudera, MapR, and Hortonworks, and also key tools like HP’s Insight Cluster Management Utility (CMU). CMU features developed from our extensive HPC cluster experience, like TimeView and CMUDiff, are perfect for managing large Hadoop clusters.
HPC also continues to play an increasing role in the Olympics. From designing new high tech fabrics for athletes to CFD simulations and wind tunnel testing of everything from bicycle helmets to wheels. Most of my Olympics viewing has been limited to airport TVs but I’ve certainly enjoyed NBC’s Live Extra app on my Android phone. Yes, unfortunately the price of Live Extras is I’ve watched more adds on my phone in the last week than I probably have over the last year, although I will say, most of the Olympics adds are more enjoyable than your normal TV intermission fair.
My favorite add, well, see below. And now matter what your job, sport, or passion, Make it Matter.
