Happy New Year

A belated New Year greeting. It has been a crazy year for accelerated computing and the deployment of special purpose hardware.

1. The HPC world clearly has embraced GPUs as a route to getting more Flops. It is unclear if any of it actually adds up to a lot more science, but the tools are in the hands of the experts.

2. Though we have many more cores, not a single new paradigm for using them has emerged. Libraries are being optimized for MPI on the system and interest in OpenMP has increased. These modest incremental updates are, in a word, useless.

3. Virtualization in the real world is there. With most jobs able to max out a single socket, virtualization of clusters is starting to make sense - not just for deployment scenarios, but also for job scheduling.

4. The problem right now isn't memory bandwidth. It's I/O. Big Data style solutions that move the compute to the data are going to be increasingly popular. However, isn't this what siesmic has been doing for years? What is really going to be new?

5. SSSDs are mainstream. But the reference architectures by use case are still being developed.

6. Rise of PaaS should create opportunities for more specialized deployments, similar to the combined software and hardware solution of Amazon's latest DB efforts. NoSQL on SSSDs... what next?

Thoughts for January. Tune in for more thoughts in February.

doug