I have been watching high performance computing (HPC) space for some time now. The storage space is one of my focus area for a long time, HPC is a niche within that. When you think HPC, vednors like isilon , Polyserver( acquired by HP), Spinnaker ( acquired by NetApp and now being offered as part of ONTAP GX) and DataDirect come to mind. These storage systems scale into petabytes ( 1000s of Terbayte) and expereinceing good growth with enterprise cutomers and even universities. Historically HPC has been very expensive -the supercomputers capable of climate modeling , earthquake simulation and so on, now with the advent of Linux Clustering, HPC prices have become more affordable and increasingly ordinary computers are being clustered together to deliver extraordinary computing. This makes sense, and talking to an industry source at one of the fortune 1000 storage company, this indeed is the market they are betting on. HPC systems need a different kind of file system usually referred to as distributed file system. Distributed File System has its own challenges but advancement in virtualization, global name spaces ( Storage X from Brocade) has made it all within the realm of possibility. As HPC becomes more affordable it is going to level the playing field for startup companies which can not afford the old expensive HPCs. There can not be any better time for a startup- the open source movement, the plunging per GB cost of storage , cheap implementation of HPC and huge talent pool with relatively low wages in countries like India, all point towards a trend where the established big boys have to compete with nimble startups! Always a good thing for the consumer! Look forward to more innovation coming your way from these startups!

>I have been watching high performance computing (HPC) space for some time now. The storage space is one of my focus area for a long time, HPC is a niche within that. When you think HPC, vednors like isilon , Polyserver( acquired by HP), Spinnaker ( acquired by NetApp and now being offered as part of ONTAP GX) and DataDirect come to mind. These storage systems scale into petabytes ( 1000s of Terbayte) and expereinceing good growth with enterprise cutomers and even universities. Historically HPC has been very expensive -the supercomputers capable of climate modeling , earthquake simulation and so on, now with the advent of Linux Clustering, HPC prices have become more affordable and increasingly ordinary computers are being clustered together to deliver extraordinary computing. This makes sense, and talking to an industry source at one of the fortune 1000 storage company, this indeed is the market they are betting on. HPC systems need a different kind of file system usually referred to as distributed file system. Distributed File System has its own challenges but advancement in virtualization, global name spaces ( Storage X from Brocade) has made it all within the realm of possibility. As HPC becomes more affordable it is going to level the playing field for startup companies which can not afford the old expensive HPCs. There can not be any better time for a startup- the open source movement, the plunging per GB cost of storage , cheap implementation of HPC and huge talent pool with relatively low wages in countries like India, all point towards a trend where the established big boys have to compete with nimble startups! Always a good thing for the consumer! Look forward to more innovation coming your way from these startups!