HPCwire: IDC's Top 10 HPC Predictions For 2008

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January 04, 2008

IDC's Top 10 HPC Predictions For 2008

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IDC's HPC team -- Earl Joseph, Steve Conway, Richard Walsh, Jie Wu and Dan Lee -- believe that current market conditions and technology trends support the following predictions:

1. The HPC Market Will Maintain Strong Growth

In 2008, HPC server market revenue will vault past $12 billion (2006: $10 billion). Clusters will make up more than 70 percent of this total, and cluster sales will shift even more notably toward blades. Systems in the Workgroup (below $50,000) and Departmental ($50,000 to $250,000) segments will account for more than 60 percent of server revenue -- about 5 of every 8 dollars spent. Worldwide year-over-year server growth will average just under 9 percent. Average worldwide growth for the HPC storage market will be higher than for servers, about 11 percent. Total revenue for HPC servers, storage and services will surpass $19 billion (not including costs for software applications, staffing, facilities and power).

2. The "Petaflop Club" Will Gain Its First Member(s)

The number of nations pursuing the prestigious (albeit arbitrary) petaflops milestone is growing apace. "Petaflop Club" contenders need not be global superpowers: the Swiss Federal Assembly may fund a system. They need not be located in the U.S. or Japan: multiple European nations, as well as China and India, are also in the hunt. In 2008, it's likely that one or more systems will attain Linpack petaflops performance and the attendant rights to chest-thumping publicity. This will pave the way for what Horst Simon (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) has dubbed The Petaflop Era and for the tougher goals of sustaining petaflops performance on an "embarrassingly parallel" 64-bit real world application, and later on a more challenging code. The U.S. and Japanese petascale programs currently appear to be best positioned for this kind of heavy lifting.

3. The High End Will Get More Competitive

While the market for HPC systems priced above $5,000,000 has been declining, the new IDC Supercomputers category (systems that sell for over $500,000) continues to show growth and offers unique opportunities for mindshare and technology innovation that can benefit the larger HPC market and vendors' overall businesses. The top 10 spots on the November 2007 Top500 list hint at the increasing geographic and vendor diversity we can expect to see in the most expensive systems category. In the November 2007 top 10, Germany, India and Sweden were represented alongside the U.S., and IBM, Cray and SGI were joined by HP. Will Borat deliver the keynote at SC09?

4. Lower End Stereotypes Will Start to Dissolve

The Workgroup and Departmental segments are the biggest growth engines for the HPC market, but far less is known about these users than their higher-end counterparts. IDC research in 2007 revealed that the settings for low-end HPC systems are more diverse than was previously believed, varying from startups to multibillion-dollar industry leaders (some of which have more than 1,000 workgroup systems).

The research also showed that although these sites generally are not doing breakthrough science and engineering, their workloads typically include both capacity work and innovation-targeted capability jobs. The financial attractiveness of the lower-end segments, especially to big hardware systems vendors and mega-firms such as Intel, AMD and Microsoft, will increasingly cause light to be shed on these users and dispel more myths in the process. (IDC plans to ramp up its 2007 lower-end research aggressively in 2008.)

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