Is Apple Preparing a Supercomputer Push?

You can’t have failed to hear about Apple’s latest hire, Mark Papermaster, and the stink raised by his former employer, IBM. Apple is technically IBM’s competitor — although there is currently very little overlap in what the two companies do — and so signing up with them is apparently a breech of Papermaster’s employment contract. We’ll let the lawyers sort that one out. The more interesting question is, what will Papermaster do at Apple?

Mark Papermaster is described as an expert in the fields of both server and processor design — both areas of interest to Apple. Processor design is probably initially the more interesting of these. Papermaster is experienced in the design of chips using IBM’s Power architecture, the same area of specialisation as PA Semi, the company which Apple purchased earlier this year. Part of IBM’s suit is that his experience could help Apple compete against them in the market for these chips. This seems more than unlikely. Apple rarely if ever in its past has manufactured components or anything else for third parties. If they plan to design Power chips they’ll be destined for their own products.

The subject of servers is, at least for me, the one with the most potential. Perhaps tellingly, Papermaster is described as a “blade server guru.” The move to blade servers have been one of the recent trends in the industry. They are designed chiefly to increase density: a server which can hold 20 of Apple’s current Xserves could hold 80 blades. (You’ll appreciate that this is a very rough comparison.) The savings in space and power consumption this brings are a boon to those running large server farms and data centres. But these are typically large corporate customers, so does this suggest that Apple is about to make a play for this market? I don’t think it does.

I think Apple’s future server business has to be seen in conjuncture with the new multi-processor technologies due in Snow Leopard. There are other markets where Apple and the Xserve already has some traction, and those are academic research and the science industries. Here, users need access to as much computational power as possible. HPC [High Performance Computing], generally based on networks of Linux machines, are the more popular tool, but Apple has gained some ground due to the ease with which its Xgrid software can be used to control similar arrays of Macs.

The theme of Snow Leopard — building on technology already available in Leopard — is to make all computing resources available to the programmer in as simple a way as possible. To abstract them in such a way that the programmer doesn’t have to care in advance how many cores are available to their code. It seems only natural that this should expand to encompass the resources available elsewhere across the local network. This is what Xgrid does, although in a far less integrated way. With this processor sharing technology in place, dense, power-efficient Xserves seem a natural addition to Apple’s product line.

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