Downfall of Traditional Supercomputing

Traditional supercomputing has hit a wall. Operators are continuously chasing faster processors, new processors such as TPUs (tensor processing units), and more space and electricity. With the new Uber economy and idle computing power everywhere, does owning and operating a supercomputer still make business sense?

Many traditional supercomputers also have a 6+ week waiting list similar to the days of the mainframe before engineers and scientists can secure time on them. Algorithms must be developed in very specific languages and constructs in order to run on these high performance computing (HPC) machines. Oh yea, supercomputer pricing starts at $250M.

I recently saw a news article about Microsoft and Cray partnering to bring supercomputing-as-a-service to the Azure cloud. In my opinion, this move simply amortizes the same problems with operating a supercomputer listed above. What if we told you that your company already owns a supercomputer?

Meet Computes, the next generation software-defined supercomputer! Computes is a decentralized computing platform that runs on every operating system to form a private peer-to-peer mesh supercomputer. Large companies can run the Computes’ nanocore software on every desktop, server, and VM (as well as on their cloud instances) to harness their idle computing cycles everywhere to create a single new supercomputer instance. There is no additional infrastructure required — just a computes software license key.

Computes nanocores connect, communicate, and compute with one another as if they were cores running side-by-side within a single supercomputer. Computes is capable of both serial computations most commonly used in machine learning algorithms as well as massively parallel computations most commonly used in research and modeling. Best of all, Computes runs your computational tasks in Docker containers allowing you to write and run algorithms in any programming language and framework!

Learn more about the Computes vision. Learn more about the Computes architecture. Join our beta program and start supercomputing today!

Stay tuned to this blog for more exciting information about our new technology stack and development progress! You can also reach us on Twitter, Facebook, and GitHub.