El Reg has a new feature story on how HPC adoption in mainstream enterprise IT has been hampered by a skills gap.
From our research, it is clear that the impact of HPC on mainstream IT is less to do with technology, and more to do with skills and operations management. Commodity hardware is widely regarded as suitable for HPC, with custom hardware reserved for the most demanding tasks. One of the reasons for this, apart from the direct cost advantage, is the pool of available skills. This has undoubtedly broadened the use of HPC, but the lack of high-end HPC skills has the potential to be a barrier to translating HPC experience into more general IT performance improvement.
Based on research published by Freeform Dynamics, the author concludes that enterprises tackling virtualization can benefit from HPC know-how in things like I/O, networking, storage systems, and fabrics. The report is interesting reading and is available as a free download.