As researchers in all major science domains struggle to keep up with the exponentially growing amount of digitally based data, the HPC (high-performance computing) community will evolve to include HPD, or high-performance data, to benefit researchers who need to access, analyze, and store extremely large data sets in significantly shorter amounts of time.

“We are figuring out ways to fuse HPC together with what I now call HPD, and put the best of both worlds into one computer system,” said Michael Norman, interim director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at UC San Diego, during a presentation this week as part of the University’s activities complementing the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting in San Diego.

Distinctions between HPC and HPD can be made on several measures, said Norman, but fusing them together has the potential to create both robust systems that will be at least one order of magnitude faster than anything in the HPC community today for certain applications. Last November, SDSC announced plans to build a new system called Gordon. Funded by the National Science Foundation and slated to be operational in mid-2011, Gordon will be the first data-intensive supercomputer of the modern era because of its novel technology.