What CIOs Should Know About High-Performance Computing

Mercy Hospital in Kansas City has a program to use HPC capability to develop targeted genomic diagnosis treatment plans for infants, and the initial pilot effort has already seen diagnose times drop from seven years to one month and reduced total specialty visits before diagnosis from 35 to one. The HPC system used for this program is a modest one, consisting of only 40 computer nodes and occupying the space taken up by a typical refrigerator. Evidence of the economic impact of HPC usage is equally compelling. An on-going IDC survey on the return on investment for HPC systems indicated substantial financial returns: across a wide range of academic, government, and industrial sites, each dollar invested in HPC resources returned an average of $356 dollars in revenue, $38 dollars in profit, and the average time before return of only 1.9 years. • The chief benefit cited by many HPC users is that HPC capability enables them to bring more innovative, higher-quality products and services to the market in shorter time frames. Whether the task is to design a commercial airplane, discover an oil reservoir in deep water, optimize a portfolio of mortgage-backed securities, create a feature-length animated film, develop a titanium golf club, or detect patterns of online consumer fraud, HPC allows more possibilities to be explored within the given time frame. In many cases, HPC makes it possible to solve problems that could not be solved otherwise. The U.S. Government already understands that the use of HPCs within its domestic industrial sector can significantly help boost economic prospects and drive its ability to complete in an increasingly aggressive global market space. • Indeed, in the 2016 White House budget request, the Administration is seeking an increase of 5.5 percent for all federal R&D over current levels for a total of $146 billion, and the Department of Energy's Office of Science— the agency that purchases a significant number of the world's largest HPC systems— is requesting $5.3 billion, i.e., nearly $300 million more than 2015 figures, an increase of 5.4 percent. • In February of this year, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz announced a cutting-edge development aimed at optimizing the innovation potential of the Department of Energy with the launch of the Office of Technology Transitions to help expand the commercial impact of the Department of Energy’s research. The U.S. is not alone in recognizing the connection between HPC capability and national economic competitiveness. • In June 2010, Representative Chung Doo-un of South Korea stated that: "If Korea is to survive in this increasingly competitive world, it must not neglect nurturing the supercomputer industry, which has emerged as a new growth driver in advanced countries." The Korean National Assembly then called for the creation of a national five-year plan for advancing HPC capability. • In February 2012, the European Commission announced that it had adopted a plan to double spending on HPC to €1.2 billion, with much of that money aimed at the installation of additional large supercomputers at leading European HPC centers. • In the past decade, China has moved from having almost no presence to being the world's second largest user of top-end HPC systems, in part by opening Beijing and local government funded HPC centers –staffed by in-house HPC experts–that support local industries looking to inculcate HPC usage into their R&D and other business processes. Ultimately, HPC systems are becoming an increasingly necessary ingredient in any industry's ability to develop new and innovative products at lower cost and with decreasing product life cycles. Fortunately, options to get access to needed HPCs resources have never been more varied and include small and inexpensive HPC set-ups that provide a low-cost opportunity to test the waters, cheap and convenient access to HPCs on a flexible pay-as-you-go schedule through myriad cloud computing providers, and outright purchase of an HPC and associated industry specific solutions from a number of HPC hardware, software, and service providers. Regardless, the evidence is clear that those who move most aggressively to bring HPCs into their workflows can gain key innovative and economic advantage, while those who do not risk being left behind.