Hardware or Cloudware?

Article from ADMIN 08/2012

By Joe Casad

Altair makes software for local high-performance computing systems and also provides HPC services through the cloud. We asked Bill Nitzberg, CTO of Altair's PBS Works division, about the changing market and the relative benefits of cloud versus local HPC.

ADMIN magazine: Altair's flagship products are its software based-simulation tools for engineering and design. In the past, you were a conventional software company, selling software you licensed to other users to run on local systems, which you still do of course, but what are you doing now to meet the challenge of the cloud?

BN: Ah the cloud … I'm a little bit of a cynic. Let me first tell you my view of what cloud is and then where we play in cloud. In some ways, cloud computing is really new, and in some ways it is not. Since the 1960s people wanted to connect computers together to seamlessly create the illusion that there was just one computer. And that went through multiple iterations – in the '70s with distributed computing, in the '80s with network computing, in the '90s with network Sparc stations and cluster computing, and then in the 2000s with grid computing – and now we have cloud computing. The big picture of cloud computing, and what everybody gets super-excited about, is much more centered around traditional business computing: data center stuff, email, web, backoffice applications. The real impact and huge opportunities are in the data center side of cloud. Typical data centers in some random company are going to be using their couple of email machines maybe 20 percent of the time – so 20 percent utilization – leaving a huge amount of waste. Consolidating that is a huge opportunity.

The HPC space is a little different, and Altair plays in the HPC space. High-performance computing is about doing really hard problems and using tons and tons of computing to get the work done. Traditionally, anyone who is doing HPC has been using their systems at a 70 to 80 to 90 percent utilization or more. So the benefits of consolidation aren't as significant. But another side of the cloud is this beautiful, abstract interface between users and producers that is implemented as portals.

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