Get ready for HPC in the mainstream

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One of the interesting side benefits of that famous Moore's Law, made famous by Intel's Gordon Moore is that from now on, for a while at least, it will be possible to get a very clear and explicit 'feel' for what it actually means.

Until the arrival of the multicore processor, the advances in semiconductor technology were increasing abstruse and meaningless to the majority of people in IT, even experts in server and infrastructure architectures. Now, a simple statement of the Law's impact demonstrates its profound effects: by the end of this year we will have at our disposal single socket, x86 architected devices sporting eight processor cores, and by the end of 2012, we will have single-socket, x86 architected devices with 128 cores.

Such a jump begs a very simple but profound question - just what are the server and systems software vendors going to do with all that power? One thing is for certain, server hardware design is going to have to change to accommodate the advances. Even more certain, systems software and infrastructure architecture will need to change drastically if the available performance and theoretical functionality is to be made available to end users. Current systems architectures have reached maturity - which is another way of saying they are now very close to being past their sell-by date. So whether they like it or not, users are about to become obliged to look at new systems architectures in order to exploit the available technology.

Using HPC technology to solve problems

In practice, the search is a simple one, for most of the answers already exist in the world of High Performance Computing (HPC). For years this has been a rarefied corner of IT where specialist technologies are exploited to achieve specialist results, ranging from weather forecasting and climate modelling through to plotting trajectories of deep-space probes. But over recent years specialist HPC technologies such as vector processors have been largely supplanted by commodity devices such as Intel and AMD x86 processors, though the systems architecture has been significantly different to that found in mainstream business systems.

That architecture, parallel processing, is what has allowed commodity processors to become as dominant in HPC systems as in business servers. What is more, it is now very rare for these processors to be designed into purpose-built, specialist hardware. Instead, the majority of systems in the famous 'Supercomputer Top 500' list are now constructed from standard rack servers - often thousands at a time - clustered together to create a unified systems entity.

It is that technology which is set to form the basis of the next generation of mainstream systems architectures, where everything is built around clusters of multiple nodes. The word 'node' in itself requires a little explanation, as the use of a growing number of multicore processors in a single server box makes it difficult to judge what constitutes a single node. Kyril Faenov, Microsoft's general manager of High Performance Computing, defines it as "that which is managed by a single memory controller, and a cluster is any system with more than one node." So, in today's money, that means a dual-socket server running dual-core processors per socket is a single node. Moore's Law eill determine what it represents in next week's money,

The idea of a single `processor' is the fundamental notion that will have to fade away, so using a single memory controller as the yardstick gets away from the problems that will come as the number of cores rise along with the number of sockets in the server. And these numbers are likely to grow even faster than a straight forward application of Moore's Law would suggest. Although the world currently seems glued to the x86 architecture, even in the multicore space, different processor technologies and architectures are starting to appear, and it is quite possible that one these may prove to be a better option for next-generation systems. With the coming parallel processing environments one of the key changes will be a removal of any dependencies between any particular processor architecture and any operating system.

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