By Rich Ptak and Bill Moran
Performance
improvements come in different sizes. Often vendors announce a 20% or 30%
performance improvement along with an increase in the price/performance of
their product or technology. Much more rarely, a vendor delivers an order-of-magnitude
improvement. An order-of-magnitude improvement equates to a performance
increase of a factor of 10. Improvements on this scale underlie recent[1]
technology acceleration announcements[2] by IBM and other OpenPOWER Foundation members.
Why
are tenfold performance improvements especially important? Here’s why. Consider this transportation example of what
an order-of-magnitude change means. Let’s say running can be sustained at a
rate of 10 miles per hour. An order-of-magnitude change raises that to 100
miles per hour. Many cars can achieve and maintain that speed. (We aren’t
recommending that!) Another order of magnitude improvement in speed moves us to
a jet airplane at 1,000 miles per hour. Another increase of this magnitude moves
to a rocket reaching 10,000 mph.
Notice
that each magnitude change increases not just speed, but dramatically transforms
a whole landscape. Moving from the jet to the rocket allows escape from earth’s
atmosphere to go to the moon. This demonstrates the potential importance of
order-of-magnitude improvements. The OpenPOWER announcements detail multiple
such improvements, let’s examine a few.
One
example comes from Baylor College of Medicine and Rice University announcing
breakthrough research in DNA structuring[3]. The discoveries were made possible by an order-of-magnitude
improvement in processor performance. As reported by Erez Lieberman Aiden,
senior author of the research paper, “the discoveries were possible, in part,
because of Rice’s new PowerOmics supercomputer, which allowed his team to
analyze more 3-D folding data than was previously possible.” A high-performance
computer, an IBM POWER8 system customized with a cluster of NVIDIA graphical
processing units “allowed Aiden’s group to run analyses in a few hours that
would previously have taken several days or even weeks.”
Another
example involves IBM’s Watson and NVIDIA’s Tesla K80 GPU
system[4]. Watson[5], of course, is IBM’s
leading cognitive computing offering which runs on IBM OpenPOWER servers.
NVIDIA’s new system allows Watson’s Retrieval and Rank API to work at 1.7 x its
normal speed. Wait a minute you might say. Where is the order-of-magnitude
change here? 1.7 is impressive, but it’s no order-of-magnitude change.
Almost
as an afterthought, IBM mentions that the GPU acceleration also increases Watson’s
processing power to 10x its former
maximum. So there we have another tenfold improvement in performance arrived at
by marrying other technologies to Power.
Finally,
Louisiana State University published a white paper[6] stating that Delta, its
OpenPOWER-based supercomputer, accelerates Genomics Analysis by increasing
performance over their previous Intel-based servers by 7.5x to 9x. Not quite an
order-of-magnitude, but close.
The announcement includes more examples demonstrating the potential of the OpenPOWER philosophy, OpenPOWER Foundation and Power Systems to achieve dramatic results across multiple industries. The fundamentals of the POWER architecture lead us to anticipate continued improvements in Big Data processing. Such developments will accelerate the growth of the Internet of Things. It will also drive fundamental changes in the possible types of processing, just like those happening with Cognitive Computing.
The announcement includes more examples demonstrating the potential of the OpenPOWER philosophy, OpenPOWER Foundation and Power Systems to achieve dramatic results across multiple industries. The fundamentals of the POWER architecture lead us to anticipate continued improvements in Big Data processing. Such developments will accelerate the growth of the Internet of Things. It will also drive fundamental changes in the possible types of processing, just like those happening with Cognitive Computing.
[5]
Watch for our upcoming blog on OpenPOWER and
Watson at http://ptakassociates.blogspot.com/
and see IBM’s site: http://www.ibm.com/smarterplanet/us/en/ibmwatson/
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