Is Google the New Name in HPC?

By DE Editors

I love its search capability, but have never been impressed with Google (Mountain View, CA; google.com) as a player in the software development space. If you want to add a few maps or embed a search bar in your Web page, Google's got you covered. And it has a decent Ajax programming tool so you can build some pretty cool Web 2.0 apps.

But if news reports are right, Google may be able to help you build the type of data-intensive applications that'll make smoke pour out of a Dell PowerEdge's ears.

It seems that Google just snapped up PeakStream, a Redwood City-based startup that makes it easier to build applications that run against multicore and multiprocessor back-ends and also exploit the latest graphical processing units. Target applications include signal processing, high-end modeling, scientific computing, and so on.

The PeakStream platform, which works with Red Hat Linux and Windows, shields the developer from having to write directly to the HPC hardware, and can automatically support new high-end hardware as it becomes available.

Existing apps can be ported to PeakStream and are thus able to exploit HPC environments.

One of the coolest things about having Google as the owner is the experience the search giant has in lashing together servers to generate truly massive computational systems. However, it is unclear exactly what Google plans to do with PeakStream, and the deal has yet to be formally announced.

Meanwhile Microsoft has been feverishly building HPC tools, with much of this work centering around clustering. Could HPC be a new battleground for these two software combatants?

Do you use HPC? Do you trust either Microsoft or Google to help build a high-performance infrastructure? Let us know by writing me at DE-Editorsmailto:[email protected].
Doug Barney

Google
Mountain View, CA
google.com