Supercomputing will soon be showing up at the enterprise level

Supercomputing was once limited to the realms of research-intensive, scientific tasks such as analysing large amounts of data to solve medical, environmental and infrastructural challenges. However, due to events like the pandemic and the subsequent shift to cloud-based technologies such as AI and machine learning (ML), high-performance computing (HPC) – which uses supercomputers and compute clusters to solve advanced computation problems - has started to make its way into the enterprise. Just as enterprise cloud computing created new ways for businesses to engage customers and enable a more flexible way of working, supercomputing is opening up possibilities for innovation breakthroughs by accelerating R&D speed and product development by orders of magnitude. Naturally, some businesses remain sceptical of HPC and are of the opinion that these technologies won’t become relevant to day-to-day operations for years to come. However, much like hyper-converged infrastructure and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), this seemingly futuristic technology is already shaping the future of the enterprise. Ultimately, HPC can be used as an indicator of the technologies that will filter into the 'civil' space over time. For example, if particular CPUs and GPUs become increasingly deployed in the HPC space, it’s a pretty good sign that they will trickle down into the enterprise and mid-market soon. Paying attention to these technologies now can help your organisation stay at the forefront of innovation and remain ahead of its competitors. After all, users in HPC belong in the early adopter customer group and look for the latest and fastest technologies before those technologies are acquired by more cautious enterprises.

Energy efficiency

You might think that ‘energy efficiency and ‘supercomputing’ are terms that don’t go hand-in-hand. After all, many of these machines require more than a megawatt of electricity to operate, and annual electricity costs can easily run into millions of dollars.

However, not only are a new generation of supercomputers helping organisations be kinder to the planet - due to the fact that they offer impressive performance per watt - they are also being used to develop the next generation of fuel-efficient products and solutions to help reduce the degree of climate change.

Take Frontier, for example, a supercomputer powered by optimized 3rd Gen AMD EPYC CPUs and AMD Instinct accelerators to deliver more than 1.5 exaflops of peak processing power. Not only does take the top spot in the latest instalment of the Top500 list, but it also tops the latest Green500 list, which measures supercomputer energy efficiency. Lumi, a pre-exascale machine located at the IT Centre for Science (CSC) in Kajaani, Finland, also ranks as one of the most energy efficient supercomputers in the world with a gigaflops/watts ratio of 51.6. The current performance of Lumi according to the Top500 list is 151 petaflops and has a theoretical peak performance of more than 550 petaflops per second.

However, what makes these machines particularly interesting is the memory-coherent nature of the optimized 3rd Gen EPYC CPU and MI250X GPU. By supporting coherent CPU-GPU memory - whereby one copy of data is processed by the CPU and GPU - less power is used to read/write data from system memory, helping top supercomputers run more efficiently.

This is a prime example of an innovative technology that, in just a few years’ time, will likely start to appear in the server market. Not only does it mean that CPUs and GPUs won’t need to waste energy working with two datasets, but it also makes life easier for software developers who will be able to write unified code for both CPUs and GPUs.

What we can learn

Creating a more sustainable business has become a key priority for organisations and today more and more companies are setting climate and/or energy efficiency goals. For those organisations, there are lessons to be learnt from the innovative technologies being employed by some of the world’s fastest supercomputers.

Both business and IT leaders can benefit from paying attention to the latest news in the supercomputer world. Today’s supercomputers go beyond high performance and scale and pave the way for next-generation computing methods and workloads like AI, driving high power efficiency to help environmental sustainability.

While ‘supercomputing' may not be a term at the forefront of your organisation’s mind, it’s clear that HPC is fast becoming a go-to tool for modern businesses looking to stay ahead in today’s competitive market.