Investigating the Integration of Supercomputers and Data-Warehouse Appliances

Two decades of experience with massively parallel supercomputing has given insight into the problem domains where these architectures are cost effective. Likewise experience with database machines and more recently massively parallel database appliances has shown where these architectures are valuable. Combining both architectures to simultaneously solve problems has received much less attention. In this paper, we describe a motivating application for economic modeling that requires both HPC and database capabilities. Then we discuss hardware and software integration issues related to a direct integration of a Cray XT supercomputer and a Netezza database appliance.