It is believed that High Performance Computing (HPC) is only for large enterprises and needs a massive investment to deploy and also to maintain. Dennis Aug, general manager, HPC Technology Solution Group, APAC & Japan, spoke to Biztech2 and clarified that HPC is not only for large enterprises but also for SME’s. It is a growing segment that HP is planning to focus on for HPC market in India and worldwide.


What is the potential of high performance computing in the SMB segment in India?

HPC has huge potential in SMB segment in India, with the clustered computing (Linux & Microsoft) gaining ground the affordability of deploying HPC solutions has become a reality. Customers can now start to solve complex HPC problems by investing small and growing as their needs and requirements grow. Clusters can help customers integrate latest infrastructure technologies at different points in time keeping the base operating system version same.


What are HP’s expectations in terms of business from Indian SMB market?

The expectation from SMB market segment is very clear. The SMB market is the growth engine for HP in India. HP wants to increase the coverage to address the SMB segment effectively. The channel partner community is the core of our strategy to grow the SMB business in India. The adoption of HPC in the SMB market has propelled HPCs acceptance to now become more mainstream.

How does an SMB CIO decide when to go for HPC infrastructure in his organization?

In most cases the line of business managers in an SMB environment drives the need for HPC. These could be the engineering managers, design or application engineers and researchers in product development, industrial design and research who need to access HPC infrastructure to speed up their product development, enhance their creativity and productivity and improve the time-to-market. From a CIO perspective the need for such infrastructure must be aligned to business objectives and once justified their role is to ensure that they are able to provide these internal users with the required infrastructure that will meet their technical needs, that is cost-effective, easy to operate, manage and maintain. This is where HP can add significant value to an SMB via our adaptive infrastructure strategy that provides a systems infrastructure that provides for growth and adaptability to the business needs.

How does a CIO deploy HPC in his organization cost effectively?

We would suggest that a CIO looks at the track record of the vendor in the HPC business such as having successful reference-sites and the ability to provision and support a broad spectrum of HPC solutions using industry-standard and open-source solutions (as opposed to proprietary solutions that is both expensive and limit one's choices in the future). The ability of the vendor to innovate in new technology that provides more performance with reduced power consumption; reduced cooling and floor-space would be advantageous to the customer. A large investment in R&D by the vendor is also an important element for future cost effectiveness.

Who are the traditional takers of HPC?

HPC systems are being used by a myriad of customers ranging from the traditional Weather forecasting and research institutes, Universities, Government and National Labs to now include Automotive and Aerospace companies, Oil and Gas companies for Oil exploration, Semiconductor companies for chip design, Pharmaceutical companies for Drug Design as well as Financial institutions for financial analytics such as portfolio pricing, arbitrage and hedge funds risk analysis.


What is HP doing to address the government sector with HPC?

At HP we have a Public Sector-focused team that works on Government contracts that would include HPC requirements. We have been pro-active in working with the Government sector in India and world-wide to address their needs for HPC solutions for their organizations such as National Labs, Defense Labs, Home-Land Security, Universities and Schools, Public Hospitals and other research agencies.