IDC: Cloud and HPC Pose Challenges for SMBs

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Cloud computing could help boost the use of high-performance computing (HPC) among small and medium-size businesses (SMBs), but there are hurdles that have to be overcome before that can happen, IDC  (International Data Corporation) said on Monday during a presentation at  ISC’11 in Hamburg, Germany.

“Today,  SMBs  that design parts for the automotive or aerospace industry or work in the oil and gas or financial industries have a lot of experience using workstations, but are uncertain about how make the first step to a server,” said Earl Joseph, program vice president of IDC’s High-Performance Systems.  “The majority of the work they do is still single threaded and single processor.”

The main advantage of moving to HPC systems is better performance, according to IDC. A job that may have taken a week on a workstation can instead be completed in a couple of hours. But cloud computing is simply too costly for many SMBs right now.

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