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Andrew's Corner: Personal Supercomputing

You’ve probably seen the rash of offerings from the various computing vendors advertising the “personal supercomputing’ mantra.  GPU-laden workstations, deskside clusters and green-computing stickers have become a normal part of the HPC soup.  However, does anyone really know what “personal supercomputing” really is?  In his latest ZDNet article, Andrew Jones takes a stab at navigating around the various potential pitfalls in defining personal supercomputing.

The first and most obvious definition of personal supercomputing involves pulling the compute closer to the user, eg: desktop/deskside computing.  However, given the general definition of supercomputing, this situation immediately violates what we consider “super.”


The problem further exacerbates itself when you consider the recent explosion of GPU-based computing.  In this case, there are dozens or hundreds of threads executing concurrently.  This does, in fact, constitute a significant increase in compute power over one’s “normal” commodity desktop.  Can you say, Monkeywrench!?

So, how do I resolve this self-conflict? It’s all relative. For a researcher who has only used desktop computers, experiencing a 10-fold increase in speed on one of these cheap ‘personal HPC’ platforms is a step-change.


The latter definition of personal supercomputing is defined within socio-political terms.  Consider a national laboratory with a large computational resource.  This resource is blessed government to host dozens [if not hundreds] of researchers in order to further their respective projects.  However, we often read about single projects commanding large percentages of the machine runtime, thus achieving a quantum leap in progress.  Given a 70% batch allocation of any one large resource to a single user/project, does this constitute personal supercomputing?  Technically speaking, the current allocation is limited in scope.  For those unfamiliar with national lab computing systems and projects, this situation does occur.  [I’m talking to you Dr. Kerr].



Either way, “personal supercomputing” can be debated back and forth until we’re all blue in the face.  As always, Andrew has written a very good evaluation.  I suggest you take a read here at ZDNet/UK.

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