SATA and SAS are storage interface and bus types designed to aid in the movement of data from one place to another. Think of SAS and SATA as different kinds of computer interfaces, such as PCI Express, but there are actually multiple components that make up the overall SAS architecture.

• Initiators. The initiator is the SAS controller to which SAS expanders or targets can be connected.
• Expanders. Expanders sit between initiators and targets, but can also connect to other expanders, as you can see in Figure A. Expanders are sort of like network switches in that they can direct traffic and they provide the ability to scale the SAS architecture beyond single port limits.
• Targets. A target is either a SAS drive or a SATA disk. SATA disks can be connected to SAS expanders and initiators, but do not perform quite as well as SAS disks.

Each drive has its own host interface (SAS or SATA) which are connected to an initiator or an expander. The initiator, functioning as the system controller, communicates with the SSD using the appropriate commands as dictated by the host interface (again, SAS or SATA.)

In other words, the SSD functions no differently than a hard-disk in terms of how it the interfaces (SAS or SATA) work. It simply utilizes a different method of storing the data.

Now… let’s introduce iSCSI

The above image includes an iSCSI initiator in the host server:

It’s either hardware- or software-based and controls communications with the Ethernet-based storage array. By virtue of the fact that the system is using Ethernet for storage traffic, speeds of both 1 Gbps and 10 Gbps are supported. In an iSCSI storage network, SCSI commands originate on the host, at which point, they are encapsulated inside TCP/IP packets. These TCP/IP packets then traverse the Ethernet network just like any other network traffic. At the storage array side of the equation, these packets are received and the SCSI commands are extracted from the TCP/IP packet and passed on to the storage device for execution. Data that is transmitted back to the host undergoes this same encapsulation process.

Basically, iSCSI adds some extra processor load because of the encapsulation process which takes time. We can think of iSCSI as a “storage transportation method.” In that sense, they resemble SATA and SAS in dealing with how the data is moved around (vs. SSD which deals with how the data is stored.) While this adds resource consumption, the author notes that it also provides a good method to decouple storage from the host, allowing for the share of storage among multiple hosts, as shown below:

However, you might be wondering exactly how does iSCSI compare to SATA and SAS. The author begins to address this.

iSCSI is the storage transport but, at present, there is no such thing as an “iSCSI disk.” iSCSI arrays use SAS and SATA disks (which can also be SSDs) for storage, but the data is transported to hosts using iSCSI.

While SAS and SATA or networking interfaces, iSCSI is a networking protocol that can run across the infrastructure. In that sense, iSCSI is complementary, not contradictory, to SAS and SATA.

Check out the original article over at TechRepublic.

Die shot of 'Aubrey Isle,' the silicon chip included in the Intel MIC 'Knights Ferry' development platform

Intel “MIC” (for Many Integrated Core) co-processor architecture is a leading initiative in Intel’s move into the realm of HPC and parallel computing. At Supercomputing 2011, Intel had an opportunity to show off the advantages of Intel MIC for a variety of computing tasks, including weather modeling, tomography, protein folding and advanced materials simulation. Intel beamed with joy unveiling their 50 core “Knights Ferry” prototype last year.

This year we are expected to see the next product in this line: the much-anticipated commercial “Knights Corner.” Early presentations of “Knights Corner” showed that the Intel architecture is capable of delivering over 1 TFLOPs of double precision floating point performance, the highest performance level achieved for a single processing chip. With this, Intel will finally have an answer to NVIDIA’s Tesla line and AMD’s Fusion APUs.

Intel MIC is also part of a larger strategy which has become clearer in recent weeks. With the acquisition of the Infiniband technology line from QLogic back in January of 2012 and the announcement of the Crystal Forest platform earlier this week, it is obvious that Intel hopes 2012 will be the year it starts to establish a solid position in the high performance computing space.

Despite the fact that we are on the cusp of the Romley / Xeon E5 release, this almost overshadows that launch in a way because it is indicative of a serious expansion for Intel into the HPC, networking, heterogeneous computing, and data center industries. Intel has even claimed that MIC outperforms GPUs when it comes to parallel computing, which means that NVIDIA in particular, as the leading provider of GPU computing solutions, may have some serious competition to contend with in the near future. And, with dedicated chipsets geared towards increasing data center network speeds without adversely affecting performance or security, it’s not hard to see how Intel’s strategy is intended to play out.

When you couple all of this with the fact that, traditionally, Intel has risen to be the dominant force in virtually every market it has entered, the future of enterprise IT has some very interesting possibilities.

Other comments made by Raj Hazra (either in the video or in the original Intel press release):

• “Knights Corner,” will be manufactured using Intel’s latest 3-D Tri-Gate 22nm transistor process. Featuring over 50 cores, Intel MIC will offer both high performance from an architecture specifically designed to process highly parallel workloads and compatibility with existing x86 programming model and tools.
• The “Knights Corner” co-processor is very unique as, unlike traditional accelerators, it is fully accessible and programmable. In this way it resembles a fully functional HPC compute node, visible to applications as though it was a computer that runs its own operating system independent of the host OS.
• A major benefit of the Intel MIC architecture is the ability to run existing applications without the need to port the code to a new programming environment. This will allow scientists to use both CPU and co-processor performance simultaneously with existing x86 based applications, dramatically saving time, cost and resources that would otherwise be needed to rewrite them to alternative proprietary languages.

HPC @ Intel 2011 – video with more info on Intel and MIC (released Summer 2011 outlining Intel’s future development in the high performance computing industry)

The promotion includes this hardware:

• Case: Supermicro 813MT-350CB
• Motherboard: X9SCL-F
• Processor: Intel Xeon E3-1230 3.2 GHz
• Power Supply: 350W High-Efficiency

You also get your choice of 8GB or 16GB memory and up to 8 TB of storage space. Our promotion includes access to phenomenally-priced Toshiba enterprise hard drives.

Remember, though, in order to get the discount we need enough people to participate! That’s where you come in! Help us spread the word by:

• Sharing on social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn
• Mentioning it in a relevant discussion forum
• Sending an email or phone call to someone you think could benefit from these tremendous savings
• Any other way you can think of!

It’s not social shopping without your engagement! Don’t be anti-social… share with others and claim your 20% discount today!

In the original Intel press release, the company announced that:

“Customer acceptance of the Intel Xeon E5 processor has exceeded our expectations and is driving the fastest debut on the TOP500 list of any processor in Intel’s history,” said Hazra. “Collecting, analyzing and sharing large amounts of information is critical to today’s science activities and requires new levels of processor performance and technologies designed precisely for this purpose.”

With their increasing movement into the HPC market, the release of the E5 processor series to the general public (they were shipped to a small number of cloud and HPC customers in September 2011) will help solidify Intel’s position in a specialized field of computing where their previous products have typically not done as well. At the time of Intel’s original press release, Xeon E5 processors were already powering 10 systems on the TOP500 supercomputers list, with over 20,000 of these processors in operation delivering a cumulative peak performance of over 3.4 petaflops. And, it is expected that the Xeon E5 processor family will power several other supercomputers in the future. In other words, this looks to be the beginning of something big for Intel in the realm of HPC.

A recent article from Computerworld has some good highlights on upcoming developments for the Xeon E5 launch:

Intel is actually cutting its server market into eight pieces with the Xeon E5 launch. That’s Itanium 9300s and Xeon 7500s and E7s at the high-end (and eventually the “Sandy Bridge-EX” E8s). That’s two segments of the market that share chipsets and memory cards, but that have different motherboards and sockets. At least until Intel finally delivers, as it is rumored to be in the works, the long-promised common Xeon-Itanium socket. That could happen with the E8s, but it is far more likely to happen with the “Ivy Bridge-EX” Xeon E9s years hence. At the low-end, there’s the single-socket Xeon E3 and Atom processors, depending on how wimpy or brawny your workload is. That’s four addressable server segments in total.

The Xeon E5s will also span four different server types and will cover the middle and overlap with the high and low ends. The Xeon E5-2600, as the first of the “Romley” server platforms are expected to be called, will use the “EP” variant of the Xeon E5 chip that plugs into the new “Socket R” CPU socket. This socket is not compatible with the current Xeon 5500 and 5600 processors, but has all sorts of goodies, including two QPI links between the processors, support for unregistered, registered, and load-reduced (LR) DDR3 main memory, and integrated PCI-Express 3.0 controllers on the processor. This is the chip that Intel has presumably been shipping under NDA to selected supercomputer and hyperscale data center customers since last fall. This chip is clearly aimed at two-socket Opteron 6200 machines.

For two-socket machines that don’t need all of these capabilities, Intel is expected to roll out its “Sandy Bridge-EN” chips, rumored to be called the Xeon E5-2400s. These chips will plug into the new “Socket B2″ socket and will sport only one QPI link between processors as well as fewer memory channels, fewer DIMMs per core, and fewer PCI-Express 3.0 slots. This chip is fired directly at two-socket Opteron 4200 iron.

If the rumors are right, then Intel will also ship a variant of the Sandy Bridge-EP chip that will be able to span four processor sockets in a single system image. This chip is expected to be called the Xeon E5-4600 and is obviously targeting the four-socket Opteron 6200.

Despite all of the excitement around the Xeon E5 series, this is only the most upcoming of Intel’s many launches this year. Check back next week when we will take a look at another one of Intel’s big plans: MIC.

But of all the areas in tech innovation, storage may be the one to set itself apart this year. Yesterday Computerworld ran a very thorough and informative piece titled “2012: The year storage becomes a celebrity,” in which they laid out some of the things to look forward to in the development of enterprise storage this year.

The Overview

While data storage has always been a necessary building block for technology, it’s rarely garnered as much attention as it has in the past two years. The reason: Corporate and retail consumers are being forced to store greater amounts of data and they need to make that data more useful — and accessible.

Enterprise storage, and storage in general, is one of those things that trends dictate will get increasingly cheaper. That doesn’t always mean that it will become more accessible, as storage needs may outpace dropping costs. However, in general storage has become more and more affordable, making a big difference to smaller and even mid-sized organizations. It’s also something that is shared across all industries almost without exception. Storage is not just an “IT” issue, but rather plays a critical role in healthcare, entertainment, finance, engineering, etc.

And ten years ago, we did not have the wide variety of options we do today…

The Rise of the SSD

One of the most closely-watched storage technologies has been the solid-state drive. When hard disk production suffered a tremendous blow from the flooding in Thailand last November, some analysts saw this as a turning point in favor of widespread SSD adoption. While the last few months have not given rise to a solid-state revolution, across-the-board price increases in hard drives made SSDs considerably more attractive as an alternative option.

It is also important to note that, while SSDs remain more expensive than HDDs, historical price trends show that their prices have fallen relatively more quickly than their hard disk counterparts.

According to new data from research firm IDC, worldwide solid-state storage industry revenue hit $5 billion in 2011, up 105% from the $2.4 billion mark in 2010. IDC expects the market will expand further in 2012 and beyond.

“2011 was a record year for the worldwide SSD market, with revenue more than doubling year over year due to strong SSD shipment growth in the enterprise and client segments,” said Jeff Janukowicz, an IDC research director. “The increasing use of flash in enterprise solutions, explosive growth of mobile client devices, and lower SSD pricing is creating a perfect storm for increased SSD shipments and revenue over our forecast.”

The Computerworld article also notes that combining these technologies together opens up possibilities that do not exist with only the traditional spinning disks. We can attest to that, as we have seen some very interesting applications done with this combination.

• Quickly making on-the-fly disk images & full copies is significantly easier than spinning drives unless they are also paired with a very efficient RAID configuration (minimum RAID 5).
• Utilizing SSDs as boot drives can greatly speed up a shared system such as a virtual private server.
• SSDs can be useful as a replication point in a MySQL dump.
• SSDs can help with caching files in a system with spinning disks, boosting performance across the entire system

The bottom line is that we now are seeing how SSDs can be used (separately and/or in conjunction with hard drives) to achieve distinct goals in a more efficient manner, rather than just using them as spinning-disk replacements.

The Future of PCIe in Storage

The other big trend is the use of PCIe technology in storage.

Dell is already selling PCIe server cards from Fusion-io, and EMC soon plans to announce the availability of its PCIe flash card initiative, dubbed Project Lightning. EMC is expected to sell its own branded flash memory cards from multiple suppliers to server makers and is likely to offer flash memory on blade servers as part of its vBlock offering.

…

Wayne Adams, chair of the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), is upbeat about the PCIe server cards.

“Now, you have higher speeds and you’re looking at transferring data at line speed between a server’s microprocessor and [flash] cache,” said Adams, who attended a two-hour panel at his association’s Winter Symposium on PCIe-solid state storage standards. “System designers are working with cache and higher speed interconnects like PCIe and changing the equation of how much storage can be put in a box in order to match server computational growth. So you can end up with more efficient storage instead of 100 hard drives with data striped across them.

“It’s all about doing more for less or more in the same foot print,” he added.

To-date, most of the use of flash memory in data center computing has been for specialized applications and use in hybrid systems. The traditional barrier is price. But as the cost handicap begins to fade the benefits of faster data access and retreival, not to mention the savings from power and storage space efficiency, such technology is becoming more and more attractive.

PCIe-based SSDs and other forms of flash memory incorporate these benefits into robust solutions for enterprise, academia, and SMB. Within this line of development, the term storage class memory emerged a couple years ago to designate high-performance memory that has the capacity and economics of storage.

While many flash-based storage devices can offer compelling economics compared to DRAM, storage class memory specifically aims to provide near-RAM performance, while also attempting to minimize I/O bottleneck issues that can arise from traditional storage connection protocols such as SATA or SAS.

Two of the leading storage class memory products on the market are Virident’s FlashMax and LSI’s WarpDrive. Both offer incredible performance compared to even some of the standards of today. They are indicative of the future trends of storage.

Next on the Horizon for Storage?

Created by IBM

These are the biggest developing trends in the field of enterprise storage. But whatever specific technologies that emerge as dominant, the challenges of storage are shared by all. With an ever-growing amount of new data and analytical tools, storage evolution must be able to keep up with our data-collection, data-management, and data-crunching needs.

Storage is an essential aspect of high performance computing, a field in which big data represents a tremendous growth opportunity. To learn more, read our article “Future Trends in HPC, Part 2.”

This is a continuation of our look at future trends in high performance computing. In part 1 we covered the first five of the top ten trends. In this installment we’ll wrap up with the remaining five.

6. Memory usage growing with multi-core

Efficient support for a shared memory model is of high importance as we approach the era of exascale multi-cores. While programmers require and demand the performance and convenience of coherent share memory, increasing core count introduces an additional burden on memory systems, while greater on-chip distances result in higher interconnect delays for memory access latencies. Various approaches have emerged, and are continuing to emerge, seeking to offset any resource overhead resulting from the increased demand on memory. These approaches include traditional appraoches, from directory-based cache coherence and remote-access, to more novel methods such as execution migration and library cache coherence.

7. Memory per core is remaining costant

While memory usage per node and processor are growing, memory per core has remained relatively constant over the past 5 years. As core count increases, so will memory requirements, impacting system design and cost:

Modern High Performance Computing (HPC) systems feature increasingly complex node architectures with a rising number of compute cores per node, while the total amount of memory per node remains constant. Under such scenarios, flat programming models such as pure MPI will fail. We must provide programmers with multiple levels of concurrency, and the most common approach is a combination of MPI for cross-node communication with OpenMP for intra-node threading. We study this setup on the Hera cluster at LLNL, a Linux cluster with 864 nodes.

-Scaling Algebraic Multigrid Solvers: On the Road to Exascale [pg. 8]

8. Cloud is still only a small part of enterprise spending, but will grow enormously in coming years

This year Gartner, Inc. estimated that while public cloud spending was $74 billion in 2010, it represented only 3% of enterprise spending. The shift away from traditional IT acquisition models to public cloud services is still young, though Gartner expects it to grow five times faster than overall IT enterprise spending in the near future – 19% annually through 2015.T

“What supply chain models did to manufacturing is what cloud computing is doing to in-house data centers. It is allowing people to optimize around where they have differentiated capabilities,” Mr. Sondergaard said.

-Gartner Inc: Worldwide Enterprise IT Spending to Reach $2.7 Trillion in 2012

With the massive market opportunity for enterprise collaboration in the cloud, we are seeing large companies (HP, Dell, and many others) looking for ways to get ahead of the game.

9. Microsoft’s share flattened after years of growth

While shares of Google and Apple have seen high double and triple digit growth in past years, Microsoft’s stocks are now worth less than they were five years ago.

Don’t misunderstand, Microsoft remains a powerful company. It continues to grow in top-line revenue each year. It’s simply at a slower pace than previous years. What that means, however, is that Microsoft may be on the cusp of transitioning from a growth company to a value company. It remains the dominant force in laptop and desktop operating systems. But, owing to its late entry into the smartphone and tablet realm, has only a minor presence in the mobile operating system world, an area of increasing importance in IT.

Moreover, as its operating margins slowly begin to decline, Microsoft will feel the squeeze to stay afloat as a company and competitive in the marketplace. It isn’t complacent about its future direction. With the release of the Windows 8 developer beta earlier in the year and the Metro UI clear application for tablet computing, Microsoft hopes to break into the industry. Yet, if the status of Windows Phone 7 is any indication, Microsoft has an uphill battle. Windows Phone 7 is not a bad product. While some have heavily decried its tile-based interface (which Window 8 Metro replicates) and the lack of applications, it serves almost a different purpose and serves it very well. By all accounts, it is a solid piece of technology.

But is it relevant in world of Android and iOS growth? Much like the company itself, it’s something that Microsoft must figure out.

So what does this all have to do with HPC? The cloud represents the direction Microsoft must take to remain relevant. Microsoft sees the potential for applying cloud technology to its consumer markets with applications like Office 365 (MS Office in the cloud.) But with free alternative such as Google Docs, it is doubtful the Microsoft can rely on this as its bread and butter. Windows Azure perhaps represents their front-line movement in this direction, as they attempt to make utility and cloud computing a more central (if not THE central) aspect of their business. This is most critical for the goal of retaining its enterprise base.

In that sense at least, HPC has become more of a first-class citizen at Microsoft. But the HPC business itself, now under the direction of Ryan Waite, the general manager for High Performance Computing at Microsoft, has been folded into the Server and Cloud Division, which itself is under the purview of Nadella’s STB. The integration of HPC into the server-cloud orbit reflects the company’s overarching strategy to use the Windows Azure cloud platform as the basis for its enterprise business.

10. Big Data represents a major opportunity for HPC vendors to grow

Big data is not just a buzzword. It represents the greatest of the actual opportunities within and beyond HPC.

So what does it mean exactly?

We can say that big data represents a growing set of applications touching large enterprises, research, SMBs, large datacenters. Big data is:

• made possible by the creation and availability of data
• continually fueled by the creation and availability of data

Many organizations are seeking to bridge the gap between having better data and making better decisions. These application areas include:

• enterprise analytics
• research analytics
• real-time analytics
• complex event processing
• data mining
• visualization

The growth of these application areas has created a market opportunity for providers of HPC technology to come in and serve traditionally unserved customers. This is the central component of the “missing middle” which really can be expanded to include all industries where HPC can be beneficial but in which only high-end enterprises are currently employing such technology.

It’s important to remember that big is relative to where an organization has come from previously. In keeping with that, 50TB could conceivably be big for an organization.

Summary

Moving forward into 2012, one of the most important aspects of HPC must be an emphasis on awareness and education. Smaller-scale organizations who know little about the benefits of HPC must be guided to solutions that are best suited for them. When we attended the HPC360 conference it was very comforting to meet so many people from different backgrounds (corporate technology, small business, academia, independent research firms) who were passionate about moving HPC forward in this way.

We look forward to the future of computing possibilities with HPC. Happy New Years!

Other Top Technology Trend Articles You Might be Interested In

TechNewsWorld – “Top Technology Trends for 2012″ - http://www.technewsworld.com/rsstory/73881.html

Deloitte Predicts the Top Technology Trends for 2012 http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/deloitte-predicts-the-top-10-technology-trends-for-2012-135248878.html

CNN – “The Top 10 tech trends for 2012″ http://www.cnn.com/2011/12/19/tech/innovation/top-tech-trends-2012/index.html

CIO Blogs – “Peering into the Crystal Ball: Top IT Trends for 2012″ http://blogs.cio.com/consumer-it/16717/peering-crystal-ball-top-it-trends-2012

Information Management – “Managing Big Data and Mobile BI in 2012″ http://www.information-management.com/news/big-data-mobile-BI-IT-consumerization-ISACA-10021690-1.html

HPC is an exciting and growing industry that ICC has been moving into the past couple years. The traditional HPC space revolved around high-end research facilities particularly in science and engineering. However, with each year technological innovations and tailored systems such as our Supermicro GPU Simcluster have brought the realm of HPC closer to reality for many small/medium-sized business and organizations.

In this 2-part series we will look at the top 10 future trends in HPC from Intersect360′s research, coupled with our own analysis and thoughts. No better way for us computer nerds to close the year right? Let’s get started.

Top 10 HPC Trends for 2012 and Beyond

1. Accelerator adoption continues

We first heard about this in 2010 with increases in GPU computing, the release of CUDA 3.0 and OpenCL 1.1, and the forming of a consensus that co-processing accelerators were needed to play an integral role in approaching the exascale. Mr. Snell reported that about two-thirds of users were testing accelerators, up from from only 20% the year prior.

Today, NVIDIA holds about 90% of the current accelerator usage. Although AMD has entered the HPC space with its “APU Fusion” line, NVIDIA sees its real challenge as Intel, who plans to move into the GPU markets with MIC next year. MIC (pronounced “Mike,” standing for Many-Integrated-Cores) is based off of Intel’s discontinued Larrabee technology. Their first expected line is the much anticipated “Knights Corner.” But while Intel virtually dominates in the realm of processors, NVIDIA’s foothold with GPU technology, especially with the recent release of the M2090 Tesla series, will be sure to give Intel a run for its money.

2. Storage is the fastest growing product sector

Storage consolidation is intensifying competition among providers, and while it remains one of those things that “always gets cheaper” in the long-run, in the short-run we are of course faced with the consequences of the recent flooding in Thailand. The impact of this could potentially be that solid-state drives start to edge their way into the HPC space.

However, undoubtedly the most important storage aspect of HPC is the stabilization of the Lustre roadmap and parallel distributed file system made for large-scale cluster computing. Previously spearheaded by Sun Microsystems, Oracle gained possession of it during their acquisition of the former company. For a while there were fears that Oracle would abandon the technology. However, after much voicing and support from the open-source community and HPC startups, it now appears that Lustre will be moving forward in tandem with the growth of HPC.

3. The Uncertain Growth of Infiniband?

Infiniband has become the dominant technology for HPC, despite Cisco’s abandonment of the technology in 2009. With its premium on pure performance in environments with high interconnectivity requirements, it is almost without question the superior option to its competitors. That said, from a bigger picture, Infiniband remains a very small fraction of the traditional Ethernet technology. Indeed, one of the reasons Cisco dropped it was due to the declining costs of 10 Gb Ethernet.

Infiniband will inevitably grow with HPC, but in order to truly flourish it needs to find new usages and markets. And if it does, the question still remains over whether it will displace Ethernet as a dominant technology. For us, we deal primarily in Infiniband, but many distributors out there still deal exclusively in fibrechannel and ethernet. That said, providers of both are starting to look at ways of merging the capabilities of each together. That means a very interesting future for networking technology.

4. The Biggest finance application is NOT trading, but rather RISK MANAGEMENT

Perhaps because of the economic crash and the bailouts, the biggest use for high-end financial computation applications is now in risk management (trading remains the second largest.) As regulation continues to come down hard on banks, we should expect to see more of this in at least the short-term. In addition, with a majority of HPC-using banks comprising the high-end of the financial institution scale, smaller, local, and regional institutions who could benefit from HPC are currently going unserved. They represent an opportunity for growth in the HPC space.

5. Facilities continues to increase share of budget

Due to the high energy costs for powering and cooling IT systems, storage and network hardware now represents the highest operating expense for a data center. And there are no signs that it will change in the near future, with a projected 19% increase in the rate of data center energy consumption in 2012. Moreover, the sheer weight of racks adds additional logistical costs to owners and managers.

While advances in green technology and innovative environmental approaches (like Facebook’s) may help to offset these costs, it is uncertain how or when these will come into play. Moreover, such technology will almost certainly come at a higher price than existing units, so the budget will have to reconcile initial outlays with expected future savings.

Whatever happens in this area, the growing processing capabilities of computer clusters, GPU Simclusters and other supercomputing technology make energy efficiency one of the top priorities for HPC in 2012.

This article series concludes in part 2

We just returned from R Systems HPC360, a conference on high performance computing down in Champaign, Illinois which brought together leading industry professionals, academics, scientists, and enthusiasts.

The conference was titled HPC360 “Innovation through Modeling and Simulation”. The event took place at the i Hotel and Conference Center in Champaign, hosted by R Systems and sponsored by a number of companies including Dell, AMD, Intel, and yours truly, ICC!

Most of the conference’s formal agenda consisted of speakers and keynote presentations. There was some opportunity for vendors to showcase their products, and ICC took down two different products with us: our MicroCloud and Modular Server.

This is R Systems’ third year holding the conference, and it is good to see a growing interest in HPC from a variety of people. The focus of the conference was on new innovations in the field and how they can help not only scientific and academic pursuits, but also commercial business.

Intel and AMD gave an overview of their recently released and upcoming products, hinting at the future direction of their rivalry. But, undoubtedly, the highlight was the many “smaller-scale” speakers that presented in shorter segments. It was a truly diverse group of people from different organizations that touched on a wide range of important topics. Intel’s Sharan Kalwani discussed the deployment of modeling and simulation at scale for the “Missing Middle,” and throughout the conference in side conversations and breakout sessions he emphasized the importance of looking at HPC as a human enterprise, focusing on human rather than technological capital.

Other speakers included Barb Hutchings from Ansys, Arden Anderson from Mercury Marine, Prashanth Shankara from CD-adapco, Matt Godo from Intelligent Light, and several others representing commercial and research organizations. The two keynote presentations were excellent. The first was given by Dell’s Executive Director of Global Sales, Egan Christensen, who held a great talk surveying the landscape of cloud computing, how it has changed over the last decade, and its impact on businesses (Dell, for example, migrated its databases to SalesForce.)

The second presentation, which was quite remarkable in its scope, was on the trends of HPC moving into the future, given by Addison Snell from Intersect360 Research. Everyone was very impressed by the information and delivery that Addison provided. It was the perfect wrap up to the conference, and it generated some fantastic discussion topics about what we should be expecting and preparing for in the coming years.

Stay tuned for a more in-depth look at the HPC market dynamics and growth from 2011, covering the trends that will shape the industry in 2012 and beyond.

Below are some photos from the event. You can check out more on our Facebook page (be sure to like us!).

Integrating cutting-edge technology from our industry-leading partners, ICC’s NovaServ™ Tesla GPU SimClusters are ready-to-deploy cluster solutions off the shelf, delivering the power of CPU-GPU parallel processing. The 1U 6016GT-T is a powerful stand-alone system. But the real power in high performance computing and GPU supercomputing comes from the ability to scale upward through computer clusters. By transforming the base 6016GT-T into such a configuration you gain an asset with incredible performance potential that draws upon the combined AND clustered power of CPU and GPU.

ICC NovaServ Tesla GPU SimCluster is available in three configurations:

Our NovaServ™ line is optimized for performance and simplicity. With our preconfigured turnkey solutions, you are able to deploy your GPU SimCluster with no hassle or worry over the technology. Let us propel your supercomputing to new heights!