Another reason to expect number-crunching and big-data management to converge
Dan Olds argues that Oracle is likely to pursue commercially-substantive high performance computing (HPC), emphasis mine:
I just don’t see Oracle abandoning HPC entirely. I think it may call it by some other name or describe it differently, but it will be in the high throughput computing business for the foreseeable future.
There are some interesting angles for it to pursue. Many of its best commercial customers have sizeable HPC or HPC-like workloads that Oracle can now (with the addition of Sun) compete for. I don’t see it passing up those opportunities.
Oracle can also look to specialize on certain subsets of the market and provide more of a solution rather than piece parts. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear of it offering an Exadata-like system that is optimized for, say, seismic or financial services. In fact, Exadata as it stands today is a decent fit for financial service analytic workloads.
HPC can be a profitable business and, in a lot of organizations, it’s growing faster than traditional business processing. From Oracle’s perspective, what’s not to like?
Now, except for the Exadata-in-financial-services comment, that’s not directly an argument for the convergence of number crunching and data management. However, I think Netezza and Aster Data are showing the way for that convergence. So, up to a point, is the scientific-research community. And of course the Hadoop guys think they have the best way to that convergent future.
But if Dan Olds is right that the best technologies for Oracle to pursue HPC and big-data processing with aren’t all that far apart, then the chances that Oracle will indeed pursue their convergence are pretty high. And that would amount to critical mass for the trend.
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