Member Article

Overcoming the High Performance Computing skills shortage

Andrew Carr, sales and marketing director at Bull Information Systems, shows how blending talent and technology can provide the perfect mix.

High Performance Computing (HPC) is a fast growing market sector. Leveraging its technology gives manufacturers, engineering companies and other commercial businesses the opportunity to drive through innovation, understand complexity, achieve more accurate and predictable outcomes and make product development faster and more efficient.

Unfortunately in capitalising on these opportunities businesses are confronted by a serious skills shortage. HPC is a highly complex technology and finding the expertise to advise, roll-out and manage HPC implementations remains a significant challenge in today’s marketplace.

Often, the skills to support HPC are so sought-after that businesses rely on expensive consultancy to hand-hold them through the various stages of implementation. So how can companies look to address this issue and ensure they are able to tap into the many benefits that HPC technology can provide?

Sourcing the Talent

Part of the problem is educational. While the rapid growth of HPC in research and industry, is increasing the demand for expertise, the decline in the numbers enrolling in courses covering the two key areas of computing and engineering is creating a shortfall. Recent analysis by the University and College Union showed that the number of computer science courses across the UK fell from 207 in 2006 to 169 in 2012. In engineering, the situation is even more serious. A recent report from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers estimates the UK needs 31,100 new graduate engineers every year for the next five years to meet industry demand in 2017. At the moment just 12,000 engineering students graduate annually.

That said, there remains a rich source of people out there, even among non-technology graduates, with the potential to become excellent HPC consultants actively working to develop the technology within commercial businesses. Changing the recruitment process can help here. Technology companies should deal with specialised recruiters that are able to spend time with the company and identify exactly what it is looking for. That means they may only be able to deliver up two or three candidates for each available HPC spot but the company concerned has the peace of mind of knowing that those candidates really fit. From a management perspective, it saves a lot of time.

Of course technology can also play a key role in helping to plug the skills gap. To accelerate adoption and bridge the skills gap at the same time, vendors first need to make systems easy to understand and use. Vendors can help streamline this process not only by implementing open, standards-based solutions but also by using simple commercial off-the-shelf technology (COTS).

Providers must also be prepared to work with their commercial customers to ensure their software and applications are modified to be capable of leveraging the size and scale of computing systems that HPC typically has to support.

Delivering HPC-on-Demand

Running alongside these developments is the emergence of a completely new delivery model for HPC known as HPC-on-Demand. This approach involves the solutions provider investing in infrastructure that gives prospective users the opportunity to buy access to that computing resource rather than having to make an upfront investment in complex IT hardware implementation.

By using this approach, manufacturers and engineering companies no longer need worry about the complexities of running their own environment, the need for highly-skilled specialised teams or the negative impact this might have on profitability. Instead they can tap into the available computing capability across the web as and when needed.

The emergence of HPC-on-Demand is also opening out the technology to a wider range of companies including many SMEs in the manufacturing and engineering spaces who have basic computing resources but lack relevant specialised IT skills and cannot invest further. They would rather outsource hardware and technical support so they can focus on their core business.

Freed from the shackles of technology that is hard to understand and difficult to leverage, such organisations now have freedom to innovate – even if they lack large and highly specialist IT support teams.

Bright Future Ahead?

The Government’s decision to pump £145 million into supercomputing in the UK is to be applauded. It demonstrates a clear understanding of how developing this kind of technology can help drive future economic growth. However, money will not be sufficient in itself to drive the growth of the HPC sector. To truly deliver success and overcome the serious skills shortage the country is facing, we need a potent mix of talent and technology. If UK PLC is to benefit fully from the potential of this exciting new market, both of these key elements need to be properly harnessed, nurtured and developed.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Andrew Carr .