HPCwire: IDC's Top 10 HPC Predictions For 2008

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Topic >> Systems

January 04, 2008

IDC's Top 10 HPC Predictions For 2008

Page: 1 of 3
1 | 2 | 3 All »

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.)

Page: 1 of 3
1 | 2 | 3 All »

Article Tools

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Subscribe

Subscribe to HPCwire

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Feature Articles

Moscow State University Supercomputer Has Petaflop Aspirations

The Moscow State University supercomputer, Lomonosov, has been selected for a high-performance makeover, with the goal of tripling its processing power to achieve petaflop-level performance in 2010. T-Platforms, who developed and manufactured the supercomputer, is the odds-on favorite to lead the project.
Read More...

Intel Ups Performance Ante with Westmere Server Chips

Right on schedule, Intel has launched its Xeon 5600 processors, codenamed "Westmere EP." The 5600 represents the 32nm sequel to the Xeon 5500 (Nehalem EP) for dual-socket servers. Intel is touting better performance and energy efficiency, along with new security features, as the big selling points of the new Xeons.
Read More...

The Week in Review

The ACM Turing Award goes to the creator of the modern personal computer; and Voltaire announces a mid-range InfiniBand switch and new technology that accelerates distributed applications. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

Intel Partners See 'Easy' Upgrade Path With Xeon 5600 Chips

Mar 18 | ChannelWeb | Westmere parts already showing up in HPC machines. Read more...

AMD: OEMs primed for Opteron 6100s

Mar 17 | The Register | But what about the tier ones? Read more...

Arrival of the Desktop Supercomputer

Mar 17 | Cadalyst Magazine | A new generation of workstations is changing the nature of technical computing. Read more...

Scheduling HPC In The Cloud

Mar 17 | Linux Magazine | Latest iteration of Sun Grid Engine able to tap into Cloud. Read more...

Tailoring Medicine with Supercomputers

Mar 16 | Bio-IT World | Biotech firm builds genetic models from patient data. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html