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Supercomputing (aka High Performance Computing, aka HPC) is no longer a tool for engineers and scientists, but has become a part of the new infrastructure for more and more companies.
One example is financial services that use HPC, linked with big data analysis to create new solutions for their employees and customers. This alliance coins a new term HPDA for High Performance Data Analysis.
HPDA, as defined by IDC, is composed of four segments:
- Fraud detection: This segment focuses on the identification of suspicious or potentially suspicious behavior and their causes by using graphical analysis, semantic analysis, or other high performance analytical techniques.
- Marketing: This segment covers the use of HPDA to promote products or services, usually using complex algorithms to discern the demographic characteristics of potential customers, their preferences and consumption patterns.
- Business intelligence: This segment uses HPDA to identify business opportunities for increasing competitiveness of enterprises by a better understanding of their activity, their competitors, and the dynamics of the markets in which they operate.
- Commercial HPDA: This segment includes all commercial HPDA initiatives other than the three that come to be described.
In the near future, a new segment will appear in the field of personal medicine. Application will focus on the analysis of the medical results and patient history for purposes of diagnosis and treatment planning compared with data coming from overall population. While a patient will be in his doctor’s office, the latter will be able to correlate the millions of archived records of patients suffering from similar symptoms to get relevant results. The doctor should thus take into account the effectiveness of different treatments for patients with similar pathological profile.
Another field for HPC and business is the 3D visualization, on your own device or using cloud infrastructure. One example of new application is Remote 3D visualization for real estate service:” Bouygues Immobilier” is the first customer of the young enterprise “MyCloud 3D”, which model 2 Green Office building. This solution was created for purposes of promotion and real estate marketing to help selling premises all over the world, offering virtual visits and re configuration on the fly
However, there are areas for improvements:
- Software remains a major obstacle. The improvement of management and administration of the HPC resources software are essential and there is a persistent gap in parallelized algorithms for the majority of users.
- Clusters are still difficult to deploy, use and manage.
- Storage and data management are more and more bottlenecks because of the significant increase in the volume of data.
Tomorrow (but sometimes, tomorrow is already real!), HPC capabilities will be embedded in small appliances: Machine Intelligence technologies like IBM Watson sits now in a pizza box and tomorrow in your smartphone or tablet.
References
IDC’s ISC High Performance, The HPC event, July 2015
