By: Surajit Sen – Chief of Staff, Modern Data Centre – APJ, Dell Technologies
The data-driven age is dramatically transforming the industries and re-inventing the future of organisations. Huge volumes of data is being generated with the advent of emerging technologies, and leveraging this data has become both critical and transformational for organizations across industries. Whether you are working to build better and intelligent machines, neutralize financial risks or anticipate customer sentiments, there is no doubt that data helps in deriving insights that lead to the success of an organization.
This is where technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics help in unlocking the value of data generated by organisations. These technologies are now converging to address the challenges that have risen due to the influx of high volumes of data which require the power, scalable compute, networking and storage provided by HPC. As a result organisations are turning to HPC solutions to enable high-performance data analytics, enabling researchers and organizations to gain insights from data. Organisations can gain faster market insights, increase efficiency and recognize higher return on investment (ROI) for data‑driven investments.
Hence, it is safe to say that HPC touches virtually every aspect of our lives. It is making weather forecasts more accurate, detecting cancer cells more efficient, making fraud protection more foolproof and products more innovative. Hence, HPC workloads are becoming more data centric and adding AI technologies to advance the capabilities of traditional HPC modeling and simulation. In the next few years, HPC technologies, such as HPC-enabled machine learning training, will go from experimentation models to production models.
Let us take a look at how new- age technologies coupled with HPC will help businesses perform better:
Pushing the boundaries
In recent years, with the advent of IoT and AI, smart living has become increasingly popular. Smart buildings, schools, factories, hospitals will become the norm in the near future, generating vast amounts of actionable data. This emerging AI community on HPC infrastructure is critical to make better and informed complex decisions as well as autonomous decision making.
What is important to understand is that HPC is not just for large companies or research organizations, it is also meant for smaller organizations that aspire to achieve competitive edge through innovation in their products. With HPC available to organizations for every workload that needs high performance, we will be able to accelerate innovation and achieve new levels of understanding and insights through AI and analytics.
The need of the hour is for all types of organisations to tap into HPC technologies to effectively deal with this evolving landscape, enabling them to derive quick insights in near real time, increasing competitiveness and business performance.
Preparing the workforce for HPC
Another focus area for organizations who are tapping into HPC solutions is to build a robust workforce to harness these technologies to their full potential. They need to help their employees to develop a comprehensive set of skills and create a community that enables HPC to grow with people that understand its value. This will help bridge the existing gap and create a well-prepared, next generation High Performance Computing workforce. Organizations also need to collaborate closely with universities to ensure the future IT workforce is prepared for the ongoing changes to push the boundaries of HPC and AI.