Could homeland security be the catalyst that ushers in the arrival of 64-bit processors?
Hewlett-Packard Co. President Michael Capellas thinks so. Coordinating the tracking of suspected terrorists across multiple federal agencies will require some hefty computation for data management, analysis and simulation. Palo Alto, Calif.-based HP is looking to market its supercomputer power to the homeland security agency for this task.
“In order to get the returns that people want immediately, you will need enormous amounts of data. This is superscale,” Capellas said.
“What you’re trying to do is take millions of transactions and look for patterns,” he said. This job would not be all that different in scope than the one executed by the $24.5 million HP supercomputer, built from a cluster of 1,388 64-bit servers, that the company sold in April to the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest Laboratory. The supercomputer is used for simulating environmental conditions.
Today, most government desktop computers run on 32-bit processors, meaning the chips take in data 32 bits at a time. While sufficient for word processing, Web surfing and other basic computing tasks, if computers users move to more speech-recognition and video-driven programs, 64-bit processors will increasingly creep into the marketplace, companies said.
On July 8, chip-maker Intel Corp., Santa Clara, Calif., began shipping the second generation of its “Itanium” 64-bit processors for servers and workstations. Although some vendors, such as Dell Computer Corp., Round Rock, Texas, have taken a wait-and-see attitude, others, such as HP and Silicon Graphics Inc., Mountain View, Calif., are forging ahead with 64-bit-based strategies for the public sector.
“Itanium 1 version was for scientists and developers to look at. Itanium 2 is really where government will reap a lot of awards,” said Bruce Klein, general manager of HP’s federal sales organization.
Klein said HP sees 64-bit servers not only serving specialized, heavy-duty tasks, such as at the Pacific Northwest lab, but also performing mainstream tasks, such as general purpose databases, enterprise resource management and customer relationship management.
In these markets, 64-bit servers can offer competitive price advantages when compared to 32-bit servers, plus savings in the cost of applications licensed on a per-processor basis.
SGI announced it would support Itanium 2 on its systems as well as its own 64-bit processors. The company offers high-performance, shared-memory servers that can be clustered to handle large amounts of complex data, such as large-scale terrain databases for visual simulation.
With the support of the Itanium chip, “we have a prime opportunity to become the leader in scalable Linux environments,” said Greg Slabodkin, spokesman for the SGI Federal subsidiary of SGI.
Integrators with seat management contracts shouldn’t worry about 64-bit processing yet, however. Intel has no immediate strategy for marketing the Itanium chip for desktop computers, said Mark Margevicius, research director of client computing for the IT research company Gartner Inc., Stamford, Conn. “Itanium is not a desktop play,” he said.
There are a number of reasons for the chip-maker’s reticence. One is that there is a considerable future still left in the company’s 32-bit line of chips, with the recent introduction of the 2.5 gigahertz speed chip and 3 gigahertz set to be released by the end of the year.
Still another roadblock is that customer demand isn’t there for improved performance. When the industry shifted from 16-bit to 32-bit processors in the last decade, it was largely because of the introduction of Microsoft Corp.’s Windows 95 operating system, which allowed users to run multiple applications at once. But there is no similar driving need for improved capability today, Margevicius said.
However, others are more optimistic. Capellas said 64-bit processors will be in desktop computers in as soon as three years. Fueling this upgrade will be multimedia applications, such as streaming video and voice-driven computers.
“The reason there is no demand [for 64-bit processors] is that we still have a stupid interface,” said Capellas, referring to keyboards and mice, which can be replaced by voice-recognition interfaces.
“The 64 bits allow you to move a bigger chunk of [the processed data] to the memory, so speech recognition or video comes off at a much higher resolution or smoother pace,” he said. The 64-bit architecture also allows the processor to use a larger range of random access memory, from four megabytes to potentially hundreds.
For the integrator, a shift to Intel 64-bit systems on the desktop means today’s 32-bit applications will have to be ported to 64-bit architecture.
However, the chips that Advanced Micro Devices Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif., plans to introduce next year will allow 32-bit software to be used without modification, Margevicius said.
Integrators don’t anticipate a big problem in the transition.
“We don’t see it at this point,” said Mike Boese, deputy chief technology officer of the Advanced Information Systems unit of General Dynamics Corp., Falls Church, Va. “We’ve been using 64-bit processors for some time. We’ve been applying them to information management and imagery. This one, to us, is very much part of the evolutionary approach in transitioning a lot of what we do.”
