Accelerated computing is gaining traction: IDC

Accelerated computing is quickly gaining traction in the enterprise as businesses embrace these technologies to overcome the limitations of CPUs says IDC.

Accelerated computing is the ability to accelerate applications and workloads by offloading a portion of the processing onto adjacent silicon subsystems such as graphics processing units (GPUs) and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs).

Accelerated computing is gaining traction in the enterprise as businesses seek solutions for overcoming the limitations of central processing units (CPUs) for workloads that require data processing acceleration. Such apps/workloads rely on (single stream) pipeline processing where data locality is important for quick handoffs between various components.

Accelerated computing is used for unstructured data management workloads, including cognitive, deep learning, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and similar types of applications; data analytics workloads, including visual analytics; technical and scientific workloads; cloud computing, both internally and in the form of acceleration as a service; and edge computing. In addition, accelerated computing will affect most workloads as defined by IDC.

"Compute will become a lot less homogeneous as today's acceleration technologies, like GPUs and FPGAs, and yet-to-be-developed accelerators start transforming server infrastructure to meet the performance demands of modern workloads, including cognitive and AI," said Peter Rutten, research manager, Servers and Computing Platforms at IDC.

When asked which specific infrastructure attributes are important for deploying mission-critical workloads in their organization, nearly three quarters of the survey respondents identified single or multiple GPUs.

"There's a new world of possibilities with accelerators, which all have unique technical characteristics and capabilities allowing the right accelerator to be matched with the right workload," said Gregoire Robinson, research analyst with IDC's Servers and Computing Platforms team.

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