Before Mississauga, Ont.-based Atomic Energy Canada Ltd. (AECL) switched to a high-performance computing (HPC) technology, the nuclear products and services company relied on costly symmetric multi-processing machines to perform product modeling and simulations.
Besides reaping the horsepower of HPC in the engineering support of nuclear products, Galton said an environment composed of individual machines allows for scalability and easier replacement of units as technology improves.
AECL made the shift in 2004 at about the time Galton said he observed HPC “had hit a certain stage of maturity” — an essential requirement, considering the nuclear product business is no arena to be using bleeding edge technology.
However, Galton had also been witnessing a better understanding of what HPC technology could do for the enterprise beyond the traditional academic and research sphere.
Universities and research institutes have employed HPC environments for a long time, but the technology has only made its foray into the enterprise in the past couple of years, said William Terrill, associate senior research analyst with London, Ont.-based Info-Tech Research Group.
Adoption was hindered by the fact that enterprise-specific applications for the technology were few, and the development of HPC code was largely proprietary, said Terrill.
Galton agreed that using an HPC environment to perform parallel tasks among many PCs certainly presents challenges, namely the need for tools and code. “The software has to support that, it’s not automatic.”
But HPC adoption in the enterprise today is facilitated by the availability of that code; a message passing interface (MPI) standard for individual computers to communicate; the power of multi-core processors; and an increasing number of software vendors offering tools for computing cluster management, said Terrill.
Al Lopez, vice-president of strategic planning and corporate development with Markham, Ont.-based HPC infrastructure software provider Platform Computing Inc., said although computing clusters are increasingly becoming affordable and accessible, some IT departments may not necessarily have the expertise to manage an HPC environment, let alone build one.
The challenges of integration and management are in part the drivers behind the company’s recent acquisition of the Scali Manage line of business from Marlborough, Mass.-based Scali Inc., which offered an HPC cluster management and monitoring system.
“Having something that’s integrated and works together certainly simplifies the task of putting one of these systems together, and work for you, and then being able to manage it afterwards,” said Lopez.
If the HPC infrastructure goes down, then they have a 1,000 design engineers doing nothing. 
In fact, Lopez doesn’t think HPC’s academic roots create a perception that hinders enterprise adoption, evidenced by the sheer number of enterprise uses substantiating its applicability and success.
Actually, there’s been a shift where HPC in the enterprise has become “core to how they do business,” said the company’s senior strategic analyst of corporate development, Nick Werstiuk.
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