New Mexico in the
USA is not the State that first springs to mind when discussing the locations of leaders in the development of IT infrastructure ideas. But that may just be about to change. The reason can be found at the

New Mexico
Computing
Applications
Center, which is the proud owner of the world’s current third largest supercomputer, which goes by the name of Ecanto, and the plan is that anyone will soon be able to buy time on it. 

In this context, `anyone’ really means large organisations like educational establishments, public authorities and big business rather than you or I. But the essence of this development is that, potentially at least, the early experiments with the concept of `public’ use of both parallel computing architectures and the utility datacentre concept have started. 

Ecanto is, as might be expected, a pretty fearsome beast, sporting some 3,500 or more four-core Xeon processors 28 Terabytes of memory and 172 Terabytes of storage. Such hardware does not come cheap, of course, and so the suggestion follows that
New Mexico is simply looking for way to defray the costs by renting out time on the box. This may indeed be the case, but even if it is true, it only goes to highlight the potential of a utility-based operational model. 

A system like Ecanto will be the very minimum needed for such a task. Indeed it will inevitably need to be more complex if only because the existing system is configured for a different world to that expected in a utility system. To be fair, the Center’s initial targets are educational establishments within
New Mexico, which probably won’t require too much to be changed. But the next target down will be large enterprises looking to run the types of applications for which even they are under-resourced – initially occasional tasks such as complex risk analysis or engineering design. 

The Center’s idea is that the machine becomes, economically at least, self-sustaining and perhaps even a revenue generator, so it will be open to many offers. This does raise an issue, of course, in that Ecanto will need to be adapted and enhanced, mainly in the area of management software, to allow it to cope with a wider workload. But the wider the workload, the better the opportunities. This will also give it scope to offer more comprehensive hosting services than normally available, which in turn should attract more users. 

But by being a supercomputer, and therefore pre-dispositioned to run parallel processing applications, it will be in a great position to offer enterprises a bridge to the introduction of parallelisation in their own operations. My own view is that the inevitable coming of parallel processing, coupled to the growing inability of existing applications architectures to exploit the performance capabilities of multicore processors, will lead to more an more enterprises turning to utility-based services in order to provide those new parallelised applications that will give them real competitive advantage. That way, they will get the advantages of `use’, without the heartache of learning the intricacies of `doing’.  

The institutional supercomputers - and especially the ones, like the Center’s, that are cash-strapped – are in a wonderful position to help enterprises pop a pinkie into the water to test the temperature of parallelisation and utility-based services and experiment with them. Those enterprises that use it to experiment in managing the gap between the new parallel world and today’s essentially serial world could well be the ones that end up with a significant advantage in their respective marketplaces.