GPU-based servers lack broad appeal

Programming challenges will limit the use of graphics processors in enterprise servers in the nearly future, say industry players who added that GPUs are finding its niche in high-performance computing.

Graphics processing units have increasingly gained favor among companies that utilize high-performance computing, however programming challenges will limit the presence of such processors in many of today's servers, industry insiders noted.

According to Dennis Ang, business development director of HPC and service provider at Hewlett-Packard 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 e-mail.

An IBM spokesperson ZDNet Asia spoke to agreed with the HP executive's assessment. 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. During many high-end supercomputers have some graphics chip in accordance with the hood, these processers have not been widely taken up among enterprise server users, he noted.

The company is working hard to change this composition

HP's Ang said that the company is working hard to change this composition. He said that HP has close working relationships with key GPU vendors and is involved in partnerships to integrate graphics-based accelerator research into its server platforms.

For instance, HP in October announced its first three-GPU blade server. With the graphics chip in place, the server is adept at performing floating-point calculations, which makes it capable of improving graphics performance, cheap HPC functionalities and emerging business needs just as cloud computing and Web serving, according to an before report by ZDNet Asia's sister site ZDNet UK.

Tapping onto the trend is cloud computing provider Amazon Web Services which added a GPU-based service for its Elastic Compute Cloud in mid-November.

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