Hewlett-Packard moved to blow its own trumpet on grid
computing this week at the International Supercomputing Conference
in Heidelberg.
Martin Walker, HP's scientific research manager for Europe, the
Middle East and Africa, said, "I've seen announcements from some of
our competitors and I've said, 'We are doing that - why didn't we
say something?'"
That's why HP is trumpeting its selection as lead partner in an
Italian grid project that will establish a research and development
environment among the universities of Lecce, Calabria and the
National Research Council CPS/CNR in Naples.
All three centres are members of the Italian Southern
Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (SPACI) whose
goal is to collaborate on national and international research.
Although this is not the first time educational and research
centres have pooled their resources through grid computing, HP
believes that this project is different because the grid will not
only be used by the SPACI members but will eventually be rented out
to industrial customers.
"I am not aware of any other group in Europe that has decided to
pool their expertise not only for scientific research but also to
create an industry that will help Southern Italy to compete
globally," said Frank Baetke, global program manager for HP's
High-Performance Technical Computing Division.
First, however, the universities will test their own projects on
the grid, which is due to be in place by the third quarter of this
year, in time for the start of the autumn school term, Walker
said.
The project, which is estimated to be worth €3m (£2m) over two
years, will initially be comprised of three clusters of HP
Integrity rx2600 Itanium 2 servers running Linux. The University of
Lecce and the National Research Council will have 68 Integrity
servers each, while the University of Calabria will have 13
Integrity servers and 16 HP AlphaServers.
HP is putting the grid together along with industry partners
such as Intel and will also provide services and applications. Each
site will feature an HP San as well as cluster management and
software development tools.
The total grid implementation for SPACI is expected to boast a
computing power of up to 1837Gflops (floating point operations per
second), and users will be supported by HP's Collaboration and
Competency Network, a forum offering the ability to share research
and expertise with the worldwide technical computing community.
Each site will establish its own area of expertise, however, and
will offer its resources for commercial collaboration and allow
companies to rent the grid for development purposes.
The project leaders aim to be talking to industrial customers by
the end of the year, Baetke said, with a focus on manufacturing and
financial services. "Italy has seen some slow growth and this is an
opportunity to attract business," he said.
For HP its also an opportunity to showcase some technologies
that it has been working on in the background, such as research
into scientific visualisation, and to tout some of its other grid
efforts.
For example, HP also announced this week that it has a contract
to build a cluster of high-performance servers for research and
development at the University of Karlsruhe in Germany.
The cluster will be supplemented with HP's Lustre-based
Storageworks Scalable File Share (SFS) product. Lustre SFS offers
real-time and scalable access to scientific data from other
worldwide computational resources.
HP Labs is also working on developing a grid in Eastern Europe
as part of a Unesco project to eliminate brain drain in the region,
Walker said.
And if there was any doubt left that HP had its mind on the
grid, Walker pointed to another project the company began earlier
this year, to support an operational grid for the Large Hadron
Collider accelerator at the European Organization for Nuclear
Research (Cern).
The project is one of the most ambitious grid efforts ever
undertaken, given that when the LHC becomes operational in 2007 the
instrument is expected to generate 10 to 14 petabytes of data a
year, which could only be handled by a grid, according to
Walker.
But HP needs to focus on enterprise applications to truly make
its mark in the field.
"If you look at the IT industry as a whole, enterprise is by far
the greatest sector. Science and research are small in comparison.
We want to get out of niche mode," Walker said.
Since one of HP's strengths is creating software for managing
complex environments, it will be concentrating on software that
helps enterprises to manage grid infrastructures, he said.
Scarlet Pruitt writes for IDG News Service