SC Conference - Activity Details

Ed Benson  (Hewlett-Packard)

Building Supercomputers

Wednesday,  01:30PM - 02:00PM

Room 12A/12B

The convergence of high performance computing (HPC), web 2.0 and cloud computing is fueling new applications and business models and driving explosive demand for compute and storage capabilities. This growth is enabled by improvements in industry standards and clustering technologies that make massive scale-out systems affordable and manageable. As this growth in computing demand becomes exponential, it is now time to apply the benefits of industry standard architecture to petascale computing. This presentation will discuss how shared HPC resource centers are becoming cloud computing providers and how that influences the infrastructure required for petascale systems. The elements and issues of building an industry standard petaflop system will be reviewed, including performance density, accelerators, power and cooling efficiencies, scalable storage, interconnects, data center space constraints, manageability, and application scaling.