© 2013 WARP Mechanics Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
Josh Judd, CTO
Q1-2013
MicroPod HPC:Your personal parallel computer
© 2013 WARP Mechanics Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
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Slide 2
Agenda
• What solutions are we trying to provide to the world?
• What is a super computer?
• What is a MicroPod HPC?
• Why would somebody want one at home?
• Why is this a good idea socially?
• Why is WARP Mechanics the right firm to do this?
• What can I do to help?
© 2013 WARP Mechanics Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
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Slide 3
What problems are we trying to solve for the
world?Problem Statement:
• Most scientific progress today requires using super computers
• There aren’t enough computer professionals skilled in this area
• This limits the number of super computers that can be built
MicroPod HPC Solution:
• Turnkey downloadable images of all parallel computer elements
• Turn commodity hardware into a parallel computer, or run as VMs
• Train the next generation of parallel computer designers and
operators
• Free, and good for the world... But it must be funded to get the
software and documentation built
© 2013 WARP Mechanics Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
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Slide 4
What is a “super” computer?
• No specific size or speed makes a system "super”
• Networked cluster of systems with software that can spread
complicated calculations across many full-scale computers
Not just a “chip with more cores”
This method will always be 1000s or more times more powerful than any single
computer
Also called “parallel” computers, or “High Performance Computers” (HPC)
• This computer science technique can be applied in different scales
to suit different budgets and computational power requirements
• It is the technique of clustering and distributing load that is the heart
of a true parallel super computer
© 2013 WARP Mechanics Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
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Slide 5
What is a “MicroPod HPC”?
• Turnkey open source parallel computer software and documentation
with applied super computer techniques
• Makes it easy to get started with parallel computing
• “Crowd funded” via a Kickstarter project
• Construct a parallel processing computer using commodity parts, as
virtual machines, or using cloud services
• Use this for fun projects, to learn parallel programming, or super
computer design and administration
• Everything specific to the MicroPod HPC will be released under
GPL
© 2013 WARP Mechanics Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
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Slide 6
Why would you want a personal super computer?
Up to your creativity! Some ideas to get started:
• Learn to program, deploy, and administer parallel systems
• Run existing parallel software at a smaller scale – and smaller
budget
• Develop parallel applications for commercial use
• Ray tracing or special effects rendering farm
• Host your own multiplayer online game
• Bitcoin harvesting
• Video repository or torrent cluster
• Create your own analytics system to examine social media feeds
• Running your own super computer is FUN!!!
© 2013 WARP Mechanics Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
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Slide 7
Why is this socially relevant?
• Super computers are used for all major scientific/engineering work
today:
– Simulating aircraft designs to reduce plane crashes
– Creating more accurate climate change forecasts
– Predict likely results of economic models before testing them in the real
economy
– Research into all forms of medicine and health care treatment
– Developing new green energy systems e.g. hydrogen fusion power plants
– The list of disciplines that use super computers is basically endless
• Society lacks HPC experts: there aren't enough
programmers, engineers, administrators, or architects to build the
computers to meet the demand
• Proliferating HPC knowledge will ensure that hyper-scale
simulation/modeling systems can be built and managed
© 2013 WARP Mechanics Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
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Slide 8
Why is WARP Mechanics the right firm to do this?
• WARP Mechanics’ mission is to bring super computing technologies
into broader IT markets. The MicroPod is an on-target example of
that.
• Years of experience building HPC systems
• Developed the "PetaPod HPC" system in partnership with Hyve
Solutions
– The MicroPod is a scaling down of that already-established architecture
• It will take considerable staff time to port this solution to VMs and
commodity hardware, but the project is well within WARP
Mechanics’ expertise
• WARP Mechanics personnel like working on HPC systems. We
don't do this because we have to. We do it because we are true
nerds at heart - just as we know some of you are too!
© 2013 WARP Mechanics Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
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Slide 9
What can I do to help?
If you believe that accelerating scientific progress is a worthy
goal, and that expanding the HPC talent pool with help with that, then:
• Buy a T-Shirt or two to support the Kickstarter project
http://tiny-url.org/micropod
• Promote the open source project page so we can build a community
of interested nerds, to run MicroPods once the project is complete:
http://www.micropodhpc.com
• Important! Forward those links to your nerdy or socially-conscious
friends