“More Hardware” May Not Be the Answer

I’m at the HPC User Forum this week, and that has already given me the opportunity to meet some of the very people I look to for news on the net.

In this post, Andrew Jones of the Numerical Algorithms Group contends that additional cores are not necessarily the perfect prescription for what ails your HPC performance:

Sometimes buying more compute power is the right answer. Sometimes, extracting more efficient performance from what you have is the answer. Bringing them together – a balance of hardware upgrades and software innovations might well give you the best chance of optimising cost efficiency, performance and sustainability of performance.