The Next Steps in HPC: India is Breaking Ground with HP-CAST

In the world of high-performance computing (HPC), enterprises and government institutions are striving to accelerate innovation, enhance business performance, increase productivity, and cultivate the knowledge and compute capabilities of partners and customers. Complementing this business-oriented focus, universities and research institutions are using HPC as a standard tool to advance scientific discovery in order to gain new insights and often breakthrough results.

In pursuit of these advancements, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) established the High Performance Consortium for Advanced Scientific and Technical Computing (HP-CAST) in 2003 – a joint user group comprised of HPE customers, partners, industry experts, members of the government and academic communities, and executives. Set up as a series of meetings and conferences, it became an ideal environment for conferences goers to network, share ideas and challenges, and take away insights from subject matter experts, thought leaders, and fellow users. Critical information gleaned from a panel of senior HPC practitioners and user forums acts as a catalyst for innovation, enabling providers to better serve customers.

Over the past decade, HP-CAST events have been held in fifteen different countries across four continents to address customer issues related to technical computing, promote essential development for HPC domains, and enable users to learn from HPC leaders from some of the world’s largest corporations and research institutions.

With the success of global and regional collaborations, HP-CAST also concentrated its sights on India. Business growth potential in the region has skyrocketed in recent years, as government and academic institutions foster a growing interest in supercomputing. Not long ago I had the pleasure of traveling to India for an academic conference, where industry authorities announced their vision to enact a holistic view of technology, extracting insights rather than crunching numbers, and becoming a mecca for HPC. HP-CAST India aims to support this initiative, not only by implementing HPC as a Service (HPCaaS), but also by driving HPC sustainability.

1. Balasubramanian, Business Development Director, India & SEA at HPE explains, “Innovation is not just about products with higher bandwidth and lower latency. HP-CAST is discussing cutting-edge solutions for real-world applications. It is about extracting insight to power those advancements.”

The question is, how do we Make India Happen?

Despite a period of sluggishness in HPC development, the International Data Corporation (IDC) expects the global market to steadily increase from $10 billion to $15.2 billion by 2019. Particularly in India where tough economic conditions have hindered the enterprise segment, the HPC segment is seeing 100% growth due to its involvement in weather forecasting and life sciences.

A major theme for HP-CAST India 2016 is learning how to make India sustainable with new technologies. Even five years ago, engineering teams focused solely on the development of products and tools. By achieving the “next level” of computing and resources, India now has the human capital and the high-performance infrastructure necessary to leverage, for example, HPCaaS in conjunction with cloud-based technologies.

The walkaways from this user-centric conference are enormous:

• A roadmap for future HPE technologies, products, and services
• Partner’s portfolio, and how they work together in a full solution stack
• Customer shared experiences with new technologies
• Customer/vendor panels and Special Interest Group (SIG) sessions to discuss innovations, achievements, and necessary improvements

A pivotal milestone in India’s transformation is the creation of a state-of-the-art computing system, much like the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC). This year India will inaugurate its first HPC Center for Excellence delivering advanced compute capabilities, high-performance applications, and faster speeds than ever before.

Yet this paradigm shift is much more than a technological success. With the help of HP-CAST, India has the capacity to exploit revolutionary scientific discoveries like The Living Heart Project, streamline financial services, increase operational efficiency to reduce government spending, and establish a productive and profitable community.

For HPC users, the value proposition is not a competitive issue. The key is to encourage communication between customers, partners, and providers, to gain insight into user needs in order to develop products and services that satisfy their evolving demands. According to Frank Baetke, Global HPC Technology Program Manager at HPE, “It is the dedication to customers that makes HP-CAST the most influential user event in the HPC world today.”

In an industry where user insight is an invaluable resource, HPE and its partners are working to engage the HPC market on a global scale. In my experience, it is not about what we as executives, developers, and engineers want to say; it is always about what users want to hear and understand, and what we can take back and learn from them. Our responsibility is to serve them with expedience, and that is what HP-CAST delivers.

I invite you to join us this September 28th-30th at HP-CAST India in Kerala where we will discuss breakthroughs in innovation and how to make India a thriving marketplace for HPC.