Is Supercomputing Finally Going to Shine in Malaysia?

Supercomputer term is mentioned in 12th Malaysia Plan, but very likely 9.8 out of 10 people don't know what exactly is that and who is gonna need it.

In a nutshell, supercomputer a.k.a. high performance computing (HPC) cluster, is hundred to thousand of high specs servers connected together to becoming a single large pool of computing resource to run computational tasks in parallel, serving multiple users. However, due to recent development of server components, smaller scale cluster with 2 and more servers can also be called supercomputer… although more appropriate to call it a HPC cluster.

AFAIK, the current scale of HPC cluster in Malaysia are generally 2 to 15 servers, a bigger one probably less than 80 servers and 100 above is probably rare. While in countries which are strong in this field generally see several hundreds to thousands of servers. To name a few renowned supercomputer facilities in the worldwide:

• Summit at Oak Ridge National Laboratory
• Fugaku at RIKEN Center for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan
• Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in Australia

Here’s a picture of HPC depicted in my company HPC solution brief, with servers fitted in 24U and 42U rack respectively.

So what can a HPC do?

The answer is actually pretty straightforward - get result faster.

For instance, to decode the gene of COVID-19 (a process called genomic sequencing), it takes a 1000 year with single server. When you pool together 1000 servers to do the job, you can get it done in 1 year; to get it done in 1 month, you need to have 12,000 servers.

Amazing, isn't it? And it contribute more than just for scientists.

HPC has actually always around us:

• Fraud detection that prevent credit card abuse
• VFX in movie like Shang-Chi are produced with thousand to millions of computing hours
• Innovation in product engineering are made possible without the need to creating many physical prototype that caused wastage
• Weather forecasting
• And many more...

Now, does Malaysia need HPC?

YES! If Malaysia wants to rank up in research and innovation, competing at international level with a faster pace, HPC is definitely cannot be absent.

What about a company, can HPC helps?

YES! Remember I mentioned running computation tasks in PARALLEL at the beginning of this article? As long as your company has something that run on a PC or server, and it cannot be processed at a single time due to data being too large or need to wait for one process to complete before another can continue, a HPC will be helpful.

Why?

Because HPC is not about performance, scheduling and process dependency and automation are also part of the key functions a HPC can deliver to an organization.

I will share more about HPC use cases in next article. Stay tuned! 😉