In a lot of ways, NVIDIA is the belle of the GPU/accelerator ball these days. (Make your reservations early for the upcoming "GPU Fancy Dress Cotillion" later on this year; tuxedo t-shirts encouraged.) Intel withdrew Larrabee, IBM isn't pushing Cell, FPGAs aren't gaining a lot of traction yet, and AMD is late to the party with Fusion.

This leaves NVIDIA in a position where they are the only major vendor offering accelerator gear that has enough of a developed ecosystem to make it reasonably easy for HPC types to take advantage of it. But this isn't going to last forever.

NVIDIA announced some new CUDA stuff today: a new developer kit (3.1) and their Parallel Nsight Visual Studio plug-in, both designed to make it easier for ISVs and other coding types to support NVIDIA GPUs in their apps. Our pal TPM has a typically detailed story here.

One thing that jumped out at me in the introductory materials is the penetration that CUDA is achieving in the industry as a whole. According to NVIDIA, there are 100,000 active CUDA developers, and there have been more than 600,000 CUDA development kit downloads.

Here’s a great blog (“Elite HPC and the Cloud Culture Clash”) discussing how much – well, actually, how little – the current hype behind cloud computing is swaying folks at large supercomputing sites.

In the article, Nicole Hemsoth correctly identifies cloud computing as more of a business model than radical new technology. She also hits on the fact that the major concern of HPC is the “P”, meaning performance – something that the cloud model doesn’t offer at this point… not when compared with owning your own gear.

Aquasar, a new water-cooled IBM supercomputer, was just fired up at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. It’s a 6-Tflop system that uses 33 two-way blades with Cell processors and an additional nine blades with dual Nehalem processors, all contained in three of their BladeCenter H Chassis. Two of the three chassis are water-cooled, covering 22 of the Cell boards and six of the Nehalem-based blades. What’s kind of cool (so to speak) is that they are using the waste heat to feed an estimated 9 kW of thermal power into the building’s heating system. This is pretty innovative stuff.

I’m increasingly convinced that we’re entering into a new phase of computing: one where competitive advantage is going to be gained or lost based on the quality of your data and your ability to analyze it. (Well, maybe not you personally... ‘you’ in a generic sense.)

This trend will accelerate the adoption of HPC-like infrastructures and workloads into the general business market. This means that your typical corporate IT shop will be asked to do more, and do it faster, than ever before. It also will bring some interesting opportunities to folks who currently toil in the HPC trenches, as the corporate types look to ramp up their companies’ analytic horsepower.

With this in mind, here’s an interesting page from Deloitte (“Business Analytics: Just Another Passing Fad?”) that looks at the pros and cons of the trend. As consultants who have a burgeoning practice in this area, it’s safe to assume that they’re in favor of it – but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t correct. They are. For further reading, I’d also take a look at another link on that page, “Clearing the Confusion: The what and why of business analytics”, for a bit of a primer on this stuff and why it’s important.