TechSense Magazine #03

TECHSENSE Magazine #03
Learn
A new era
FOR HPC-DR
INNOVATION
| By Michaël Renotte |
More and more data is being created and collected
every day, and post-digital businesses want to
leverage the insights that come from it, thus driving
demands for greater computing capabilities.
IDC found that in 2020, 64.2 ZB of data was created, captured,
or replicated, and that number is expected to grow to 180 ZB by
2025. But of all the data created in 2020, only 10.6% was useful for
analysis or for AI/ML models, and only about 44% of that was actually
used, which means that businesses are currently underutilizing their
data and losing value. Increasingly, the answer to this massive data
concern is found in high performance computing (HPC), also known as
supercomputing. HPC isn’t fundamentally new: the phones we carry
around in our pockets would have been considered supercomputers 30
years ago. But a combination of GPUs and other purpose-built chips is
starting to push HPC capabilities to new thresholds and benchmarks
previously thought to be decades away – an acceleration that is rapidly
making these capabilities mission critical for businesses everywhere.
— Shaping the future of High Performance
Computing
High-performance computing has evolved rapidly since its genesis
in 1964 with the introduction of the CDC 6600, the world’s first
supercomputer. Since then, the amount of data the world generates
has exploded, and accordingly, the need for HPC to be able to
process data more rapidly and efficiently has become pivotal.
This requirement to process data more efficiently has forced
HPC designers to think outside the box in terms of not just how
the data is processed but where it’s processed and what ends up
getting processed.
With cloud computing now firmly established, the floodgates
opened up to a whole new world of supercomputing innovation
and experimentation. Here are the top five drivers likely to impact
the effectiveness of HPC systems and what they mean for the
potential of the modern enterprise to fully capitalize on its new
wealth of data:
— Artificial Intelligence
It would be very hard to talk about HPC without mentioning Artificial
Intelligence. Over the last years, with the advent of the Internet of
Things, 5G, and other data-driven technologies, the amount of data
available for meaningful, impactful AI has actually grown enough
for Artificial Intelligence to have an impact on high-performance
computing, and vice versa.
High-performance computers are needed to power AI workloads,
but it turns out that AI itself can now be used to improve HPC
data centers. For example, AI can monitor overall system health,
including the state of storage, servers, and networking gear,
ensuring correct configuration and predicting equipment failure.
Companies can also use AI to reduce electricity consumption and
improve efficiency by optimizing heating and cooling systems.
AI is also important for security in HPC systems, as it can be used
to screen incoming and outgoing data for malware. It can also
protect data through behavioral analytics and anomaly detection.
— Edge computing
Companies can deploy their high-performance computing data
center on premises, in the Cloud, at the “edge“, or with some
combination of these. However, more and more organizations
are choosing distributed (i.e. edge) deployments for the faster
response times and bandwidth-saving benefits they bring.
Centralized data centers are simply too slow for modern applications,
which require data computation and storage to take place as
close to the application or device as possible to meet increasingly
stringent, 5G-enabled latency SLAs.
Speed is of course a key component of high-performance computing,
as the faster HPCs can compute data, the more data they can
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