Trends that Will Influence HPC's Future
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Trends that Will Influence HPC's Future

CIO Review

A new era is dawning in high-performance computing (HPC), marked by customer demands for power efficiency and greater accessibility to technology.

FREMONT, CA: High-performance computing (HPC) is entering a new phase characterized by client demands for energy efficiency in advanced computing, increased accessibility to technology, and collaborations on artificial intelligence initiatives.

Three significant trends emerge as a result:

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Exascale computing, which pushes high-performance computing to a new performance and energy efficiency threshold

Artificial intelligence is combined with high-performance computing to help solve some of humanity's most complex challenges, such as climate change.

High-Performance Computing as a Service (HPCaaS) makes HPC accessible to a broader audience.

Why exascale computing is significant

Exascale computing refers to computers capable of performing a quintillion calculations per second. It has been acclaimed as ushering in a new era of high-performance computing, allowing scientists to simulate the climate and understand the human brain more efficiently than ever.

Exascale computing is primarily concerned with maximizing performance at the very limits of physical laws. But a significant hurdle is its energy consumption and sustainability concerns, which necessitate energy-efficient cooling systems for improved dependability and performance.

The optimal answer is "exascale to everyscale," in which advancements in exascale computing cascade down to other levels of high-performance computing (HPC). The majority of organizations do not need an exascale system costing hundreds of millions of dollars, but petascale systems, for instance, can nevertheless extract value (a mere 1,000,000,000,000,000 calculations per second).

Disease, climate change, and weather forecasting are among humanity's greatest problems, and HPC and AI collaborate to find solutions.

Why HPC is optimized for AI

Cutting-edge research frequently combines AI and HPC; the two technologies often interact. One of the primary HPC applications is the training of AI models, which has resulted in a surge in demand for computing power. There is also a crossover where AI is utilized in a conventional HPC process to increase research productivity.

AI and machine learning (ML), aided by HPC, assist researchers in tackling some of humanity's greatest challenges. Researchers can use HPC systems to find ways to feed the world's population in the coming decades and diagnose sight-threatening retinal illnesses.

For instance, research aided by AI and HPC is resolving the issue of decreased food production resulting from climate change. As populations increase, food crop yields are already declining, and the global food supply will need to increase by 50 percent to meet rising demand.

As a result, humanity requires new, more efficient food production methods. Using robust, efficient computing infrastructure paired with AI to digest vast volumes of data collected from sources such as satellite imaging, weather reports, and even sensors in fields to increase crop yield, HPC will play a vital role in resolving this issue.

In medicine, HPC-powered AI could usher in an entirely new approach to disease treatment by providing the knowledge necessary to genetically customize medicines for each patient. It is anticipated that "personalized medicine" will revolutionize how we treat illness, yet its full potential cannot be realized without vast processing power.

The human genome sequencing has been reduced from almost 150 hours to 18 minutes, bringing the dawn of customized medicine closer to fruition.

HPC as a service

As in most other computing fields, 'as a service approaches are transforming the consumption of high-performance computing and making it more accessible to academics worldwide. Its fastest-growing sector is cloud-based HPC, which enables enterprises to rapidly add capacity.

By eliminating overprovisioning, HPCaaS enables users to pay monthly with a low upfront investment, reducing total cost. Customers get access to the most advanced and cutting-edge HPC technology, which is replaced as it becomes obsolete.

Improving the planet

All three trends indicate that HPC may make the world a better place: The sheer power of exascale computing enables future discoveries, AI gives the intelligence and analytics to yield superior insights, and 'as a service,' the model will provide unprecedented economic access to this technology.

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