Prospects for Business-Oriented Enterprise-Class High-Performance Computing

With the advent of the blockchain era, the importance of business-oriented enterprise-class High-Performance Computing (HPC) is becoming increasingly significant. Business activities such as digital cryptocurrencies demand a broader spectrum of computations on HPC in terms of security, cryptography, and reliability.

Recently, José E. Moreira, a distinguished researcher at IBM’s Watson Research Center, gave a keynote address at the 19th annual Association for Computing Machinery International Symposium on Frontiers in Computing. Based on an in-depth understanding of today’s business-oriented processors, he analyzed enterprise-class HPC.

First, modern business-oriented processors must handle a broader range of computing than ever before. In addition to more traditional business applications, such as transaction processing or Web services, these processors need to perform many calculations to support business analytics. Such computations include graphics algorithms, classical machine learning, deep learning, and computational finance. The numerical processing requirements for these calculations are similar to science and engineering. But business computing also has its provisions, including security, cryptography, compliance, and even data variability that leads to unique behaviors in enterprise environments.

Second, he introduced a new modern business-oriented processor, the IBM POWER10. This POWER10 combined a balance of computing power and interconnect bandwidth. Its processing core has significant enhancements over its predecessor, including improved vector processing and a new matrix math engine. The processor also adds new security features, including protection against return-oriented programming attacks.