Good afternoon, everybody, and I want to start off by thanking you for your time.
I'm actually very tempted to answer the last question from Professor Matsuoka that was
aimed at Bull from HP's perspective.
I don't believe it.
Maybe he'll ask me that question again at the end of the presentation.
I kind of hope so because I think we've got a fairly good answer for that.
So as was discussed, I'm going to spend a few minutes today talking to you a little
bit about HP's approach to the high performance computing market and really how it's our
intention to provide solutions for HPC that go well beyond the compute space.
I know you guys are a bunch of engineers and you hate to see marketing slides with lots
of pretty colors on them, and I kind of hate to present marketing slides with colors on
them because I'm an engineer myself, but this topic of converged infrastructure is actually
really meaningful from a customer perspective, from an operational efficiency perspective,
and from an application efficiency perspective.
What we mean when we say converged infrastructure is that we're not just building a compute
environment, we're building a compute environment with a fabric, with a storage subsystem, with
the software on it to deliver maximum efficiency, and of course we're packaging that in an infrastructure
that is as efficient as it can be from a power utilization and management perspective so
that the sustained performance that you're getting is giving you the best possible performance
per dollar, not just PUE.
We really have taken some significant steps as a company in terms of how we're approaching
the high performance computing market.
Going back four or five years ago, maybe even six years ago, HP was approaching the market
much like other providers of compute clusters by pushing servers into the marketplace for
high performance computing that were essentially identical to what was being configured for
a Microsoft Exchange server or an Oracle database or perhaps an SAP transactional processing
environment.
Starting four or five years ago, we recognized that although that kind of an infrastructure
was satisfying a significant percentage of the high performance computing market, it
wasn't allowing us to push all the way up to the top of the marketplace.
We underwent a transition.
We began moving from machines that were designed to function across a full range of IT to much
more purpose built designs.
The first step that we took there was something we called our HPC class blades.
That was tremendously successful.
We took this knowledge that we had about how to build single standalone servers and
we raised that to sort of an enclosure level.
We got tremendous efficiency from a power utilization standpoint.
We got tremendous performance and we really built into that enclosure level a scalability
and a purpose built for HPC kind of a design.
We embedded the InfiniBand fabric.
We were able to deal with the high performance CPUs.
We were able to put a common management infrastructure across an enclosure level now.
That gave us tremendous success.
We had 200 systems on the top 500 that were HPC class blades.
Nobody else in the marketplace ever got that kind of success with a single common architecture.
We built upon that last year when we introduced something called our scalable line, SL.
We took all that learning that we had in our C class blades which was an enclosure level
design, 10U kind of a design and we've now moved that to a rack level design.
Now we're designing HPC systems purpose built with servers designed for deployment at the
rack level.
We really think that gives us a tremendous advantage in terms of performance, in terms
of efficiency, and in terms of agility, the ability to take modular steps.
You guys as HPC are very seldom building solutions which are quarter rack size.
You're taking big chunk bite sizes, right?
So we're now designing at that kind of an element, at that kind of a chunk size and
we think that's the best way to get the maximum efficiency.
Let me talk to you a little bit about performance, okay?
I'll answer a little bit of Professor Matsuo Kasan's question here as I go through this.
We really believe that the right way to get the maximum penetration into the HPC space
is not to purpose build designs that satisfy only small segments of the HPC market, okay?
What we want to do is take an industry standard design and we want to maximize the capability
of that industry standard design to satisfy the largest part of a particular marketplace
that it can do.
A great example of that is the way that we introduced our version of accelerator based
servers.
We, of course, much like everybody in the industry, started with the idea of let's
take accelerators, whether they be GPGPUs or FPGAs or even ASICs, and let's put them
into servers.
Let's slot them into PCI slots in servers, okay?
Guess what?
We use the very same servers to host those kind of devices that we did for other things,
okay?
Starting three years ago, we took a next step.
We said let's purpose build a server that hosts the GPGPUs inside the server with the
idea to penetrate the oil and gas market.
We did that for a couple of very large oil and gas customers and we found almost immediate
success in terms of market take-up, okay?
Last year at this conference, we talked about the server that's up here on the screen here,
the SL390 server, which we co-designed with Professor Matsuoka-san over there and in fact
was the basis for the number four system on last fall's top 500.
We designed that to be able to host GPGPUs, okay?
And that server was designed from a clean sheet of paper.
It had full bandwidth PCI Gen 2 by 16 to each of the three GPUs that could be hosted in that
2U half-width server.
We designed it with the capability to have two rails of InfiniBand, one of which we put
down on the motherboard with the Mellanox Connect that's two-part.
We designed that server to be able to host the very high wattage GPUs and we've gone
through several generations of those GPUs as NVIDIA has become sort of the pillar of
success in the GPGPU market.
So that model of purpose building a design of extending the capability of industry standard
servers to satisfy more and more of the requirements and taking that accelerator design to satisfy
more and more of your GPGPU requirements is the path that we're on.
Since we did that design last fall, we now also have a 4U half-width version of that
that can host up to 8 of the GPGPUs and it says on here, coming soon, we'll be extending
that in the next generation as we move into the Sandy Bridge environment.
We'll be extending that to also have FDR based in InfiniBand and we just last week announced
the capability to host the M-290 GPGPUs from NVIDIA.
So we really think this model of industry standard servers combined with special design
for high performance computing in such a way that we maximize the penetration rate is the
right route for us to go.
Let me talk for a minute about efficiency.
It was interesting I attended the IDC breakfast on Monday morning and they talked about data
center electrical use and at the barrier that that presents to almost everyone in the community
answered that question, yes, that is a problem for me.
Interestingly enough, everybody answered the problem, questioned that that was a problem,
but only 50% of the users in the survey actually paid for their electrical cost.
So even when you're not paying for your electricity, you still think that your electricity use
is a problem for you.
We just last week announced the M-240A version of our performance optimized data center of
our containerized data center.
That particular version is a free air cooled version.
It has the capability to host standard IT.
It has two 40-foot containers, if you will, with a shared hot aisle in the center.
Each of them has a separate cold aisle, fully serviceable from both sides, deployable in
a fraction of the time as building a data center from the ground up.
So we have a promise to the industry that when you order one of these performance optimized
pods from HP, completely customized with your IT, doesn't even have to be HP's IT in the
center of the thing, we will deliver that from our factory 12 weeks after receipt of
order with the IT equipment installed and tested in HP's factory, delivered in place,
strained into place on your racks, and in this case, all you need to supply is the fiber
optic connection to get your inputs in and out, and of course, electrical.
This particular version is free air cooled.
We also have DX assisted if you're in an environment where you can't deal with free air cooling
100% of the time, and we have a version of it that uses what we call a swamp cooler if
you're in a place where it's too dry.
So we have a significant new penetration in the market with these performance optimized
data centers, so I'm going to speed on through here.
Okay, so one of the other places where we're, of course, working at HP is to maximize the
ability of high performance computing users to penetrate the marketplace, and we're firmly
believing that there still exists a portion of the market for which deploying their own
cluster is either not the right thing to do from a monetary perspective or a user is in
a business and doesn't want to be bothered with actually having to go through the maintenance
of high performance computing environment and all the complexity that comes along with
it themselves.
So we are working together with several partners to create what we call hybridized based environments
here where you may have a workstation user who needs to launch his work, not physically
on his workstation, but out into the cloud.
So we're working on that together with some of our partners, and one of our early implementations
of that particular service is being done together with one of our partners, Moab, and in this
case we have taken, okay, I didn't do that, we have taken the step to enable Moab together
with a product that HP has called Cloud Services Automation, or HPCSA, that will allow us to
create instantiations of high performance computing environments, essentially clustered
environments in clouds like those that you may see out there in the marketplace, whether
they be on Amazon or some of the other hosted service provider spaces.
So we really think this is an important step for enabling high performance computing.
Okay, so if you will, just in summary, HP is in the market, we're covering the market
space all the way from the bottom all the way up to the top.
We're today participating in the U.S. Department of Energy effort in the United States to create
Existale Computing.
We've had many, many meetings this week with folks here in Europe which are also pursuing
that direction.
Our intention is to develop solutions which, although based on industry standard components,
are able to perform specifically for HPC and really extend that capability all the
way up to the top of the marketplace.
And we are preparing the marketplace to be able to deal with high performance computing
in the cloud in a successful way, which will enable even small and medium business customers
to be able to take advantage of HPC.
All right.
Thank you very much for this talk, and our first inquisitor is Happy Citali.
Hi, thank you, Frank, for an interesting talk.
Ambitious title, purpose built for any scale.
But I would say I'm quite disappointed that the best way of pushing high performance computing
astronomy, was it just ignored or you're just afraid of it?
So I think the question was, are we afraid to penetrate the astronomy marketplace for
high performance computing?
SKA specification.
SKA, SKA, right.
So SKA is square kilometer array, which is an effort for radio telescope, which is being
developed while in the southern hemisphere.
So in fact, HP is the provider of a system to a cooperative in Australia called IVEC,
high performance computing system in IVEC, which is doing some of the pre-analysis work
for the square kilometer array.
Interestingly enough, that system that we deliver to IVEC is 2,000 of our C class blade
systems in what we call our double dense solution.
So this was a rack of know that we designed specifically for HPC.
In that C class blade configuration, we deliver 2,000 of those inside of a pod, inside one
of our performance optimized data centers.
And it's sitting on the west coast of Australia, processing data today in preparation, if you
will, one of the early implementations for the square kilometer array.
So I think HP is very much in the business of tackling radio telescope pre-processing
and post-processing, and I hope we wind up with a big chunk of the SKA business as it
goes forward.
Next question comes from Felix Sherman.
Thank you very much for your presentation.
You make HPC computing sound a little bit like a one-click online buy challenge, so
I just go there and buy my supercomputer.
Now the devil's in the detail, and the configuration of these things is very hard.
Will you provide us a genius button to actually configure our exascale cluster?
Well, I'm not sure I can provide you the genius button, but we do develop actually inside
my research and development team that's also the team that's working on these nodes and
InfiniBand and GP GPUs.
We actually do develop a thing called the configurator, the HPC configurator.
We started this back four or five years ago as an Excel spreadsheet, and the intent was
to give something to our pre-sales folks that they could manipulate together with customers
to look at various alternatives live, like what if I run this particular processor SKU
from Intel and this memory config and these InfiniBand parts, how does that reflect in
terms of my power consumption, my RACU requirements, my cooling requirements?
So we developed this configurator initially as an Excel spreadsheet.
We have since done a significant amount of work to convert that into a Visual Basic tool,
so now in fact we have it packaged on a laptop the capability for pre-sales folks from HP
to go out and in fact meet with customers and really manipulate a very detailed level
design on that laptop and really get all the way down to pricing based on that laptop.
So I'm not sure that's really the equivalent of a genius button because what this toolkit
is really doing is eliminating the very difficult step of understanding all the part numbers
and how all those things interrelate to our ordering systems inside of HP, which I'm sure
is of very little interest to any of you guys as customers.
But it doesn't eliminate the need for knowledge, but it certainly reduces the time to evaluate
scenarios by our customers as they're contemplating various configurations, which of course we
all go through every time we run one of these competitive solicitations.