by Anton Shilov
02/25/2009 | 11:26 PM
Believing that the economic downturn makes computing technology key to reducing cost and increasing operational efficiency, the HyperTransport technology consortium recently stated that it sees ongoing demand for optimized high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure capable of supporting job allocation, data handling and peak power flexibility. The HyperTransport technology is projected to be in the center of the tech shift.
“Demand for efficient data center and server farm infrastructure will continue to rise despite weaknesses in the global economy. Therefore, service provision players will need computing platforms that can support peak performance, real-time resource allocation and minimized Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Servers must offer an even more refined balance of performance, power consumption, mission-critical reliability and cost,” said Mario Cavalli, general manager of the HyperTransport Consortium.
Highlighting hardware and software virtualization and consolidation as vital enablers of cloud computing, HT consortium members discussed the applications and technologies that will be central to the high-performance computing market in the coming years at the International HyperTransport Symposium and Workshop 2009 held earlier this month. The workshop took place at the HyperTransport center of excellence, which is managed by the Computer Architecture Group of the University of Heidelberg in Mannheim, Germany.
The consortium expects HyperTransport to play an increasingly pivotal role in meeting upcoming HPC industry requirements. In its eight years of widespread adoption – ranging from consumer products to top performing supercomputers – the technology has evolved in its performance and features, delivering increased and ongoing value to users. The Consortium’s recent releases of the HyperTransport 3.1 Link specification and the HTX3 HyperTransport Connector specification – supporting up to 51.2GB/s and 20.8GB/s of aggregate bandwidth respectively – enable the future-ready, high-performance computing infrastructure required to satisfy the industry’s rising demand for performance, power and cost efficiency, as well as emerging HPC techniques like cloud computing.
“As the industry’s lowest latency, highest bandwidth and high-dependability interconnect technology, HyperTransport will be central to commercial enterprises’ ability to meet this new HPC market challenge,” Mr. Cavalli proclaimed.
HT consortium also said that cloud computing gives the commercial enterprise sector a way to outsource whole or part of its enterprise software application and customer relationship management (CRM) needs on a pay-as-you-go basis using software as a service (SaaS) techniques. The approach drastically reduces computing infrastructure and resource investments. Evidently, the rise of cloud computing will require extremely powerful HTC and datacenter environments.