GPU-based servers lack enterprise appeal

GPUs have increasingly gained favour among companies that utilise high-performance computing, but programming challenges will limit the presence of such processors in many of today's servers, industry insiders have noted.

According to Dennis Ang, business development director of high-performance computing (HPC) and service provider at HP Asia-Pacific and Japan, not all business applications can run on GPU chips. Additionally, it will take time for existing apps to be redesigned and ported over to run on GPU-based servers. These two factors will hamper widespread acceptance of such servers, he noted in his email.

Sinisa Nikolic, high-performance computing program director at IBM Growth Markets said that "programming challenges" will continue to limit the adoption of GPU chips among server makers. While many high-end supercomputers have some graphics chip under the hood, these processers have not been widely taken up among enterprise server users, he said.

For more on this ZDNet UK-selected story, see GPU-based servers lack broad appeal on ZDNet Asia.