Cluster around - dinosaurs' day dims

By Stan Beer
August 9, 2005
Transparent view of the Orion under-desk scalable supercomputer. Each of the eight boards has 12 complete computers.


The days of sharing massively expensive supercomputers that use proprietary hardware are nearly over, says the founder of a US company bringing high-performance computing to the desktop.

Colin Hunter founded Orion Multisystems in 2003 and is now boss of the Silicon Valley high-performance computing vendor. He says his company's desktop and deskside multiprocessor computers show a trend towards personal supercomputing based on industry-standard architecture and software.

The desktop version, which runs on the Linux operating system, has a motherboard containing 12 x86 processors; and the deskside model, with up to 96 processors, produces up to 230 gigaflops of computing power — about 20 per cent of the performance of a supercomputer listed on the Top 500 list of the world's most powerful machines.

Mr Hunter says proprietary supercomputer monsters and their air-conditioned rooms and dedicated power supplies are giving way to clusters of industry-standard systems that plug into any ordinary power socket.

"If you go to and look at the current list of top 500 supercomputers, the trend is towards Linux as the dominant operating system, processor architecture of clusters is the dominant way you get high performance, and Ethernet is becoming the dominant interconnect fabric," Mr Hunter says.

"This is at the very peak (of) performing computers where you would expect certain types of exotic technology to be most present. If (we) go below the top 500 and look at high-performance computing in general, the trend towards standardisation is even greater."

In a world once resigned to paying millions of dollars for a high-performance computer, the trend to standardisation is good news. Orion Multisystems' entry-level 12-processor desktop system, available in Australia, delivers a respectable 28 Gflops of performance for $22,000; the top-shelf 96-processor system sells for $193,000.

Mr Hunter says the standardisation of high-performance computing on Linux and x86 architecture is good for prices and for the proliferation of high-performance software systems.

"Because of standardisation on x86 and Linux, software developers can target a generic supercomputer and know what that means," he says.

"It's pretty much the case that a generic supercomputer is a cluster based on x86 architecture running Linux with Ethernet interconnect. If you know that's what you're aiming at, you can write software that runs on those supercomputers."

Mr Hunter says standardisation as demonstrated by his company's systems is aimed at bringing supercomputing to the masses. Some might claim that where supercomputing is concerned there are no masses, but Mr Hunter disagrees.

"What we are seeing is an explosion in the use of high-performance computing in a variety of applications," he says.

"Hollywood is moving overwhelmingly to the use of digital technology and away from film. If you look at the companies doing all the (digital) work, they tend to be small shops and they don't have giant facilities. They want to have a high-performance computer that they can plug into a wall socket and they don't want to pay $10 million for it."

He also points to the oil and gas sector, where the difficulty is not the drilling but using computers to analyse the geophysical structures beneath the surface of the earth, usually based on data from controlled explosions.

"The computer analysis might take place in a huge data centre in Houston, Texas, but the well is being drilled in Kuwait. Instead of shipping huge amounts of data to Houston, analysing it, and shipping it back to the field, they can do it locally with a high-performance computer that can be moved around."

Other applications identified by Mr Hunter include medical imaging and defence electronics.

Adelaide-based John Noonan, Orion's recently appointed manager in Australia and New Zealand, says he will represent the company directly in the market until he appoints resellers.
