Underwhelmed by hyperbole

From time to time I see a press release containing such a broad, over reaching claim, that I am forced to laugh. When a company has to claim the sun and the stars, it is likely that in the end, they'll only show their customers the moon later. Furthermore, someone shows that they clearly don't understand the IT adoption cycle when they claim that a new technology or approach, regardless of its merits, will kill something already in the datacenter. Datacenters are computer museums. Companies don't abandon technology before it is fully amortized and is no longer needed.

Segment of press release in question

A Couple More Nails in the Coffin of the Private Compute Cluster

Cycle Computing has been in the business of provisioning large-scale computing environments within clouds such as Amazon EC2 for quite some time. In parallel, we have also built, supported, and integrated internal computing environments for Fortune 100s, universities, government labs, and SMBs with clusters of all shapes and sizes. Through work with clients including JPMorgan Chase, Pfizer, Lockheed Martin, Purdue University, among others, we have developed a keen sense for use cases that are most appropriate for either internal or external computing. More and more we see the lines blurring between internal and cloud case overall performance. This is good news for end users that want to have the flexibility to consume resources both internally and externally.

During the past few years it has been no secret that EC2 has been best cloud provider for massive scale, but loosely connected scientific computing environments. Thankfully, many workflows we have encountered have performed well within the EC2 boundaries. Specifically, those that take advantage of pleasantly parallel, high-throughput computing workflows.

Snapshot analysis

When I read this headline, I was immediately reminded of something Mark Twain said - "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." If I didn't read things like this so often, I would think that it was funny in a sad sort of way. When companies feel that they have to reach to statements that include "a couple more nails in the coffin of...", it makes me wonder about the rest of their claims.

Organizations are unlikely to abandon their expensive IT infrastructure period. New technology and new approaches are far more likely to be brought in as the situation requires. I have no doubt that this will be the same for graphics processing unit (GPU)-based high performance computing as well.

What is clear is that the use cloud computing approaches for this type of computing, with or without the use of graphics processing units as a compute engine, makes it possible for people to make use of massive compute power for new tasks because the cost of use can be made to fit the organization's budget.