Paris-based infrastructure provider Bull continues its push into the high performance computing arena with the acquisition of science+computing AG,
a move that the company’s chairman and CEO Didier Lamouche said is the
most important investment it has made since entering the HPC space.
Bull’s
goal of emerging the leader in the European HPC space, with the help of
the German company, illustrates how businesses in the commercial space
are increasingly taking note of HPC technology and its myriad
applications.
HPC
was best known to be deployed in academic and research circles where
long-term projects required massive compute power to process reams of
data. But while HPC is observed to be more frequently used outside of
academia, there are changes even within the commercial space in how the
technology is used and by whom.
HPC
is no longer the sole domain of the IT department, rather it’s becoming
possible for the everyday end user with limited IT skills to interact
more directly with the technology once viewed as a scientist’s tool.
Case in point, last month Microsoft released its Windows HPC Server 2008,
among which the functionality included the ability for individual
non-IT groups to run and manage computations on their own cluster at an
assigned workstation in the confines of their department. And, while
the goal is to alleviate weight on IT departments by reducing the
bottleneck of requests that occur at particular points in the business
cycle, the non-IT users also benefit by being granted the capability to
just sit in a regular-looking workstation in the comfort of their own
department and run computation models at will.
Bringing
HPC down to the common enterprise user is made possible by management
consoles that offer a user friendly interface between finance staff,
for instance, and the technology. But it’s not just the availability of
interfaces that’s helping, it’s also the fact that the console
essentially ‘manages’ HPC and renders the technology in bite-sized
pieces digestible by the user.