Scientific Computing - HPC Source November 2014

ing that they are less likely to result in unforeseen side effects due to interactions with other proteins.

In the past, it took three weeks to model a protein.

Using HPC resources, the company managed to reduce that time to 12 seconds. And, in fact, from an end user’s perspective, it takes only three seconds from asking a question about a specific protein structure to receiving the answer from the databases — which is life-changing!

HPC enabled Moleculomics to take the lead over their competition through their ability to compute structures for all variants of proteins that are present in the population. They are now beginning to run screening experiments using algorithms to investigate the interaction of these variant structures with candidate compounds for drugs.

Thinkplay.tv and Moleculomics are just two examples among many. In today’s world, high-performance computing has become the competitive edge that can help companies, big or small, to increase their productivity, reduce their time to market, save on development costs, and employ the foremost tools to compete.

Any small engineering and design company should consider using HPC as part of their computer-aided simulation activities. Today, most HPC systems are built from commodity elements of servers, interconnect and storage, or, in other words, a compute and storage cluster. These are not the complex proprietary systems of the past. One can easily build an HPC system by him or herself, and guidelines on how to do so can be found, for example, on the HPC Advisory Council Web site: www.hpcadvisorycouncil.com.

For instance, by buying dual CPU-socket servers from the server company of choice, adding the required amount of storage to maintain files, and connecting it all with InfiniBand interconnect, one can gain the power of supercomputers. There are many HPC sites that provide access to their systems, and the HPC Advisory Council also provides access to various HPC systems in order to test and experience the power of HPC first-hand. There are many applications that the council has pre-tested and provided guidelines on how to best use to form an efficient HPC system.

Using standard-based HPC systems is important for any business to maintain, whether they are new to HPC or experienced. Standard-based solutions ensure backward and future compatibility, ensure support from a large eco-system of vendors and users and, of course, ensure the ability to use many of the open source or open-source based software libraries and applications.

Infographic
What’s Your Cooling Profile?

Cooling is a priority

More than 45% of survey respondents who answered the question were running at least 7Kw of equipment per rack.

80% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that reducing cooling costs is one of their highest priorities

People are relying on conventional cooling techniques

51% of respondents used air containment as part of their data center cooling strategy

55% used CRAC or CRAH units

Liquid cooling is underexplored

Less than 1% of respondents used immersive or direct to chip cooling

9% were prepared to consider immersive cooling technologies

45%

80%

51% 55%

<1%

Regulating temperatures in the modern data center can be a challenging task. In this data center cooling survey, Data Center Knowledge set out to find out how those responsible for managing data center environments coped with cooling them. It quizzed people with managerial roles in modern data centers to determine their current practices and attitudes toward data center cooling. The survey explored current tools and techniques that they used, and also looked at cutting-edge technologies to evaluate their adoption.