InsightIQ Blog

High Performance Computing in Marketing: Why Should I Care?

Jun 17 2010

The purpose of this article is to give an overview of high performance computing and an example of why it is relevant in marketing. This article will serve as the foundation for many other articles I will write.

What is High Performance computing?

High Performance computing or HPC is the use of a supercomputer or computer clusters to solve complex problems that involve an astronomical number of calculations. Supercomputers or computer clusters are simply aiming to achieve one goal: wicked-fast computing. They try to achieve this by adding more processors which adds parallelism. Parallelism gives the system the ability to do multiple calculations simultaneously.

How is this relevant to marketing?

An example: In marketing exists one of the most complex problems that spans across multiple subjects in academia; how does the human mind make decisions? Marketers have access to a large portion of the data that would aid in understanding this question. The way they utilize it is the key in developing precise and optimal marketing campaigns. The problem is, to effectively use this data to try and understand the decision making process requires ample computing power. HPC is a way to provide insight into the question.

Drawbacks

One drawback of HPC is the programming of such a system. To effectively program the system is rather difficult. There are many things to consider: process importance, dependencies, message passing, deadlocks, and many more. All of which boil down to effective load balancing between processors.

Final Thoughts

Although HPC has a large amount of complexity within the system, it is important to keep its technology in consideration. As the future progresses and multiple processor technology continues to grow HPC is a technology that you will find hard to neglect.

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