Tabor Research Bullish on HPC Market

By Michael Feldman

October 16, 2008

With the threat of a deep recession looming on the horizon, IT industry analysts have been busy trying to figure out if their slice of the economic pie is about to shrink. If a broad and protracted recession does occur, the IT industry will certainly suffer, since so much of its revenue is driven by consumer and SMB spending. But there will be pockets of growth too, and the high performance computing market may be one of them.

Tabor Research has looked into its crystal ball and found plenty of signs that HPC will continue to experience healthy growth over the next couple of years. In the company’s latest user survey, the “HPC Budget Map Survey,” two thirds of the 93 respondents said that they are prepared to increase their HPC budgets substantially over the next couple of years. Of these, two thirds expect to increase spending by 10 percent and nearly half by over 20 percent. Less than one in eight users say they will scale back spending.

Looking further out, Tabor is forecasting total HPC revenue (servers, software, storage, plus services) to grow from $18.6 billion in 2007 to $27.2 billion in 2012, a 46 percent increase. IDC, meanwhile, is predicting $15.6 billion by 2012, but that represents only HPC server revenue. Since Tabor estimates around 42 percent of total HPC revenue is derived from server sales, the corresponding 2012 server figure for them is just $11.4 billion.

That’s not surprising. IDC gets most of its input from suppliers — OEMs mostly — so you’ve got to consider that there might be some wishful thinking mixed into the calculation. The Tabor results are based on end users, a demand-side view, which is more likely to portray actual buying behavior. Regardless, the annual growth rates forecast by both analyst organizations are quite similar — around 9 percent CAGR.

Tabor is actually predicting servers will grow less slowly than some of the other segments. It highlights HPC storage, in particular, as the fastest growing piece of the market. That seems to make sense, since the current explosion of data is driving a discontinuity between compute and storage demand.

One may wonder if all this cheery news takes into account the tanking of the global economy. The IDC numbers came out last month, so presumably the data was collected during the summer. But the Tabor surveys were completed in September, after the start of the U.S. credit crisis. Additional Tabor surveys were completed in one local market in the first half of October and were consistent with the earlier findings. So unless these users were hiding under a rock for the past few months, they’re all aware of the current financial turmoil.

The theory behind this seemingly recession-proof growth is the close relationship between HPC and R&D. Both IDC and Tabor Research believe that HPC will endure tough economic times because of the strategic importance of R&D for commercial and government organizations. And since both OEMs and end users appear to agree, it must be true, right? I suppose it depends on how deep the recession goes. If it turns into a 1929-type collapse, all bets are off, since both government and business behavior is going to switch into survival mode.

On the other hand, for either a recession or depression, the federal government ends up being the most dependable source of spending. If grown-ups are in charge, spending will actually increase to help pull the economy out of a hole. In the U.S. at least, that would involve printing money, which would precipitate inflation. That could actually lead to higher revenue numbers for HPC, since everything will cost more. That’s not a good thing in itself, since inflated dollars aren’t “worth” as much.

Since government is heavily into HPC, both directly (e.g., DOE centers, supercomputing centers) and indirectly (e.g., academia, commercial partnerships), it could and should play a stabilizing role in the HPC market during a downturn. In the Tabor survey only 12 percent were government users, while 38 percent were from commercial and industrial organizations and 50 percent came from academia. But all groups were generally bullish on HPC spending. “We looked at the data, and similar growth expectations exist across academia, commercial, and government, with only minor variation,” said Addison Snell, vice president and general manager of Tabor Research.

The irony here is that if HPC were broadly deployed across small and medium sized businesses, like everyone is clamoring for, the market would be much more exposed in an economic downturn. The fact that high performance computing is still (mostly) a technology for elite users will insulate it from the nastiest effects of a recession. The agonies and the ecstasies of true HPC “democratization” await.

Subscribe to HPCwire's Weekly Update!

Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industry updates delivered to you every week!

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion XL — were added to the benchmark suite as MLPerf continues Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing power it brings to artificial intelligence.  Nvidia's DGX Read more…

Call for Participation in Workshop on Potential NSF CISE Quantum Initiative

March 26, 2024

Editor’s Note: Next month there will be a workshop to discuss what a quantum initiative led by NSF’s Computer, Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate could entail. The details are posted below in a Ca Read more…

Waseda U. Researchers Reports New Quantum Algorithm for Speeding Optimization

March 25, 2024

Optimization problems cover a wide range of applications and are often cited as good candidates for quantum computing. However, the execution time for constrained combinatorial optimization applications on quantum device Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at the network layer threatens to make bigger and brawnier pro Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HBM3E memory as well as the the ability to train 1 trillion pa Read more…

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing po Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HB Read more…

Nvidia Looks to Accelerate GenAI Adoption with NIM

March 19, 2024

Today at the GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia launched a new offering aimed at helping customers quickly deploy their generative AI applications in a secure, s Read more…

The Generative AI Future Is Now, Nvidia’s Huang Says

March 19, 2024

We are in the early days of a transformative shift in how business gets done thanks to the advent of generative AI, according to Nvidia CEO and cofounder Jensen Read more…

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, codenamed Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from Read more…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. Wh Read more…

Alibaba Shuts Down its Quantum Computing Effort

November 30, 2023

In case you missed it, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba has shut down its quantum computing research effort. It’s not entirely clear what drove the change. Read more…

Nvidia H100: Are 550,000 GPUs Enough for This Year?

August 17, 2023

The GPU Squeeze continues to place a premium on Nvidia H100 GPUs. In a recent Financial Times article, Nvidia reports that it expects to ship 550,000 of its lat Read more…

Shutterstock 1285747942

AMD’s Horsepower-packed MI300X GPU Beats Nvidia’s Upcoming H200

December 7, 2023

AMD and Nvidia are locked in an AI performance battle – much like the gaming GPU performance clash the companies have waged for decades. AMD has claimed it Read more…

DoD Takes a Long View of Quantum Computing

December 19, 2023

Given the large sums tied to expensive weapon systems – think $100-million-plus per F-35 fighter – it’s easy to forget the U.S. Department of Defense is a Read more…

Synopsys Eats Ansys: Does HPC Get Indigestion?

February 8, 2024

Recently, it was announced that Synopsys is buying HPC tool developer Ansys. Started in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1970 as Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. (SASI) by John Swanson (and eventually renamed), Ansys serves the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering)/multiphysics engineering simulation market. Read more…

Choosing the Right GPU for LLM Inference and Training

December 11, 2023

Accelerating the training and inference processes of deep learning models is crucial for unleashing their true potential and NVIDIA GPUs have emerged as a game- Read more…

Intel’s Server and PC Chip Development Will Blur After 2025

January 15, 2024

Intel's dealing with much more than chip rivals breathing down its neck; it is simultaneously integrating a bevy of new technologies such as chiplets, artificia Read more…

Baidu Exits Quantum, Closely Following Alibaba’s Earlier Move

January 5, 2024

Reuters reported this week that Baidu, China’s giant e-commerce and services provider, is exiting the quantum computing development arena. Reuters reported � Read more…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

Comparing NVIDIA A100 and NVIDIA L40S: Which GPU is Ideal for AI and Graphics-Intensive Workloads?

October 30, 2023

With long lead times for the NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs, many organizations are looking at the new NVIDIA L40S GPU, which it’s a new GPU optimized for AI and g Read more…

Shutterstock 1179408610

Google Addresses the Mysteries of Its Hypercomputer 

December 28, 2023

When Google launched its Hypercomputer earlier this month (December 2023), the first reaction was, "Say what?" It turns out that the Hypercomputer is Google's t Read more…

AMD MI3000A

How AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat

October 5, 2023

When discussing GenAI, the term "GPU" almost always enters the conversation and the topic often moves toward performance and access. Interestingly, the word "GPU" is assumed to mean "Nvidia" products. (As an aside, the popular Nvidia hardware used in GenAI are not technically... Read more…

Shutterstock 1606064203

Meta’s Zuckerberg Puts Its AI Future in the Hands of 600,000 GPUs

January 25, 2024

In under two minutes, Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, laid out the company's AI plans, which included a plan to build an artificial intelligence system with the eq Read more…

Google Introduces ‘Hypercomputer’ to Its AI Infrastructure

December 11, 2023

Google ran out of monikers to describe its new AI system released on December 7. Supercomputer perhaps wasn't an apt description, so it settled on Hypercomputer Read more…

China Is All In on a RISC-V Future

January 8, 2024

The state of RISC-V in China was discussed in a recent report released by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The report, entitled "E Read more…

Intel Won’t Have a Xeon Max Chip with New Emerald Rapids CPU

December 14, 2023

As expected, Intel officially announced its 5th generation Xeon server chips codenamed Emerald Rapids at an event in New York City, where the focus was really o Read more…

IBM Quantum Summit: Two New QPUs, Upgraded Qiskit, 10-year Roadmap and More

December 4, 2023

IBM kicks off its annual Quantum Summit today and will announce a broad range of advances including its much-anticipated 1121-qubit Condor QPU, a smaller 133-qu Read more…

  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire