The demand for greater levels of computational performance remains insatiable in the high performance computing (HPC) and technical computing industries, as researchers, geophysicists, biochemists, and financial quants continue to seek out and solve the world’s most challenging computational problems.

However, access to high-powered HPC systems has been a constant problem. Researchers must compete for supercomputing time at popular open labs like Oak Ridge National Labs in Tennessee. And, small and medium-size businesses, even large companies, cannot afford to constantly build out larger computing infrastructures for their engineers.

Imagine the new discoveries that could happen if every researcher had access to an HPC system. Imagine how dramatically the quality and durability of products would improve if every engineer could simulate product designs 20, 50 or 100 more times.

This is where NVIDIA and SoftLayer come in. Together, we are bringing accessible and affordable HPC computing to a much broader universe of researchers, engineers and software developers from around the world.

GPUs: Accelerating Research

High-performance NVIDIA Tesla GPUs (graphics processing units) are quickly becoming the go-to solution for HPC users because of their ability to accelerate all types of commercial and scientific applications.

From the Beijing to Silicon Valley — and just about everywhere in between — GPUs are enabling breakthroughs and discoveries in biology, chemistry, genomics, geophysics, data analytics, finance, and many other fields. They are also driving computationally intensive applications, like data mining and numerical analysis, to much higher levels of performance — as much as 100x faster.

The GPU’s “secret sauce” is its unique ability to provide power-efficient HPC performance while working in conjunction with a system’s CPU. With this “hybrid architecture” approach, each processor is free to do what it does best: GPUs accelerate the parallel research application work, while CPUs process the sequential work.

The result is an often dramatic increase in application performance.

SoftLayer: Affordable, On-demand HPC for the Masses

Now, we’re coupling GPUs with easy, real-time access to computing resources that don’t break the bank. SoftLayer has created exactly that with a new GPU-accelerated hosted HPC solution. The service uses the same technology that powers some of the world’s fastest HPC systems, including dual-processor Intel E5-2600 (Sandy Bridge) based servers with one or two NVIDIA Tesla M2090 GPUs:

SoftLayer also offers an on-demand, consumption-based billing model that allows users to access HPC resources when and how they need to. And, because SoftLayer is managing the systems, users can keep their own IT costs in check.

You can get more system details and pricing information here: SoftLayer HPC Servers

I’m thrilled that we are able to bring the value of hybrid HPC computing to larger numbers of users. And, I can’t wait to see the amazing engineering and scientific advances they’ll achieve.

-Sumit Gupta, NVIDIA – Tesla

My name is Beau Carpenter and I’m writing my first blog for SoftLayer to introduce myself and share some of my background and experience to give you an idea of what life is like for someone in finance at a hosting company. In a nutshell, my mission with is to understand, organize and report every dollar that comes into and goes out of the company. These financial reports are reviewed internally, shared with our investors and used when we have a trigger event like the merger with The Planet last year.

To give you a little background about who I am, the most notable thing about me is that I’m a third generation Marine. My grandfather served in WWII, my father served in Vietnam, and I joined during the Gulf War, serving from 1991–1995. After completing my tour and receiving an honorable discharge, I returned home to Texas to get my education and start working … while growing a family of four.

After I earned my bachelor’s degree, I went to work at Rice University for Nobel Laureate Richard Smalley, winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize for discovering nanotechnology. Rick was a fantastic mentor, and when he recommend that I join Rice’s MBA program, I thought it was a pretty good idea. It didn’t hurt that his glowing recommendation gave me a great foot in the door to the program. I earned my MBA from Rice in May of 2005, and headed out into the corporate world … If you can call SoftLayer, “corporate.”

The majority of my coworkers probably have no idea what I do because I spend a lot time tucked away in my office running numbers. As you probably could have guessed, in financial analysis/reporting, strong numbers are a lot easier to report than bad ones, and SoftLayer’s numbers have been so good that they keep me up at night. I know that sounds strange, but I’m up every Sunday night and month-end at midnight so I can communicate our company’s progress for the past week or month as soon as it is over. Some may not find that late night work appealing, but being numbers jockey, I can’t help but be excited about sharing the latest information … even if it could technically wait until the next morning.

I’ve been in denial for a few years, but after rereading that last paragraph, I have to admit I’m officially a nerd now.

I’ve done financial and nonfinancial metrics analysis for a couple of companies before I landed at SoftLayer, and the difference between this company and others I’ve worked for is night and day. The culture here is healthy and positive, everyone’s focused on their work, and the company provides a lot of perks to keep everyone going. Energy drinks, super-cool coffee machines, endless snacks … but the most important perk is the general sense of camaraderie you get from being around a team of professionals who are passionate about their work.

Kevin asked me how I’d compare my experience at SoftLayer to my experience in the Marines, and I think the most resonating similarities are the shared sense of purpose and the close ties I have with my team.

Semper Fi + Innovate or Die.

-Beau

I run the Market Intelligence group at SoftLayer, and my team is responsible for reviewing success metrics internally and in comparison with many of our competitors. We have a wealth of data at our fingertips, and one of the most interesting statistics I track is related to market switching data.

Today, I was looking closely at some of our most recent domain name data, and I came across some pretty amazing information. We have millions of data points instantly available for filtering and sorting, so we can produce some pretty insightful market intelligence that can help us make better business and customer decisions.

While reviewing that domain name information, I did a quick pivot exercise in Excel to see the number of domain names hosted by SoftLayer – not just DNS hosted by us, but a pretty comprehensive view of the number of domains hosted on our infrastructure. As of March 1, 2011, we had 19,164,117 domains. Yes, you read that correctly: More than 19 million domains are hosted by SoftLayer. To give that a little context, the total domain name pool was 282,602,796, so we hosts about 6.78% of all domain names on the Internet.

That’s impressive, but it’s not the end of the story.

The number of net new domains coming to SoftLayer on a monthly basis is even more remarkable … From October 2010 to March 2011 – a 6 month snapshot – the total number of domains hosted on SoftLayer infrastructure had compounded growth of 124%:

What will the next six months hold? You can bet I’ll be refreshing the data to keep an eye on it. Without extrapolating much other information, I’d say that the growth numbers are astounding and they’re indicative of an unwavering confidence from our customers.

-Todd

Until there is such an application that can detect and address a conversation that may be heading in the wrong direction, we have to rely on good ole’ training and experience. With each call and query, the baseline is reset. I’d even go further to say that with each exchange; the baseline is reset as our Customer Service Agents seek information to get to the root of the issue. It’s not hard to imagine the frustration that can build in a back-and-forth conversation as two people look to come to a solution or an amiable conclusion just as it is understandable that sometimes, a customer may simply need to vent. How do you calculate and anticipate those scenarios?

I wish much success to the team involved in the customer service speech analysis program. And programmatically speaking, I see many CASE, SWITCH, FOR, WHILE, BREAK, CONTINUE, IF, ELSE, ELSE IF, NEXT statements in your future. Good Luck!