"This IBM® Redbooks® publication highlights IBM Technical Computing as a flexible infrastructure for clients looking to reduce capital and operational expenditures, optimize energy usage, or re-use the infrastructure.
This book strengthens IBM SmartCloud® solutions, in particular IBM Technical ...
, Introduction to technical cloud
computing
This chapter introduces the concept of technical computing, the value of cloud computing, and the types of
cloud for enterprises.
This chapter includes the following sections:
•What is Technical Computing
•Why use clouds?
•Types of clouds
1.1 What is Technical Computing
This section describes Technical Computing.
1.1.1 History
This section introduces the history of high-performance computing (HPC) and how Technical Computing
became mainstream.
Traditional high-performance computing (HPC)
The IT Industry has always tried to maintain a balance between demands from business to deliver services
against cost considerations of hardware and software assets. On one hand, business growth depends on
information technology (IT) being able to provide accurate, timely, and reliable services. On other hand,
there is cost associated with running IT services. These concerns have led to the growth and development
of HPC.
HPC has traditionally been the domain of powerful computers (called “supercomputers”) owned by
governments and large multinationals. Existing hardware was used to process data and provide meaningful
information to single systems working with multiple parallel processing units. Limitations were based on
hardware and software processing capabilities. Due to the cost associated with such intensive hardware,
the usage was limited to a few nations and corporate entities.
The advent of the workflow-based processing model and virtualization as well as high availability concepts
of clustering and parallel processing have enabled existing hardware to provide the performance of the
traditional supercomputers. New technologies such as graphics processing units (GPUs) have pushed
power of the existing hardware to perform more complicated functions faster than previously possible.
Virtualization and clustering have made it possible to provide a greater level of complexity and availability
of IT services. Sharing of resources to reduce cost has also become possible due to virtualization. There
has been a move from a traditionally static IT model based on maximum load sizing to a leaner IT model
based on workflow-based resource allocation through smart clusters. With the introduction of cloud
technology, the resource requirement is becoming more on-demand as compared to the traditional
forecasted demand, thus optimizing cost considerations further.
These technological innovations have made it possible to push the performance limits of existing IT
resources to provide high performance output. The technical power to achieve computing results can be
achieved with much cheaper hardware using smart clusters and grids of shared hardware. With workflow-
based resource allocation, it is possible to achieve high performance from a set of relatively inexpensive
hardware working together as a cluster. Performance can be enhanced by breaking across silos of IT
resources, lying dormant to provide on-demand computing power wherever required. Data intensive
industries such as engineering and life sciences can now use the computing power on demand provided
by the workflow-based technology. Using parallel processing by heterogeneous resources that work as one
unit under smart clusters, complex unstructured data can be processed to feed usable information into the
system.
Mainstream Technical Computing
,With the reduction in the cost of hardware resources, the demand for HPC has spread technical computing
from scientific labs to mainstream commercial applications (Figure 1-1 on page 3). Technical computing
has been demanded from sectors such as aerodynamics, automobile design, engineering, financial
services, and oil and gas Industries. Improvement in cooling technology and power management of these
superfast computing grids have allowed users to extract more efficiency and performance from existing
hardware.
Increased complexity of applications and demand for faster analysis of data has led Technical Computing
to become widely available. Thus, IBM Technical Computing is focused on helping clients to transform their
IT infrastructure to accelerate results. The goal of Technical Computing in mainstream industries is to meet
the challenges of applications that require high performance computing, faster access to data, and
intelligent workload management.
,
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