Continued jostling among big HPC suppliers, ascent of the industrial segment as a market driver, and a projected total HPC market growth (CAGR) of around 5.2 percent pushing revenues to $36.9 billion by 2020 are a few highlights from the most recent Intersect360 Research report.
One item of interest is Intersect360’s decision to break out the big hyperscalers. “The ultrascale internet segment continued its expansion and maturation, to the point where we now consider it a distinct market… starting this year, Intersect360 Research will track it as a separate super-segment, under the more widely accepted name of hyperscale,” according to the report.
Data and analysis for the hyperscale market are not included in the report (Worldwide High Performance Computing (HPC) 2015 Total Market Model and 2016–2020 Forecast) and will be analyzed separately according to the report. Previous years’ High Performance Business Computing (HPBC) data has been adjusted for the removal of this segment.
Another interesting point is Intersect360’s observation around big data. “To date we have not been able to identify significant market uplift effects that can linked to this application sets as it pertains directly to incremental HPC spending. Our research has indicated that there is a significant percentage of IT budgets being spent on projects related to Big Data; however, in most of these cases, it appears that this budget is being reallocated (or perhaps merely renamed) from other projects, and there is not a distinct market for infrastructure dedicated to Big Data”
The HPC vendor pecking is still feeling the fallout of IBM’s sale of its x86 business to Lenovo, according to the report. HPE is on top followed by Dell, IBM, Lenovo, Cray, SGI (in the process of being purchased by HPE), and Fujitsu.
Intersect360 expects public sectors will continue to be constrained by a “long-term shift towards austerity policies,” and commercial and industrial spending to become an increasingly important part of the overall HPC market. It’s easy to wonder what sluggish spending by the U.S. will mean for ambitious new government HPC plans such as the National Strategic Computing Initiative.
Servers still comprise the largest single HPC equipment segment followed by storage. Industrial growth is forecast at 6.8 percent with academia at 3.2 percent and government at 3.0 percent for the forecast period. The growth rate in spending on cloud was high at 13.4 percent but is still small in absolute numbers.
Intersect360 Research’s market model and forecast focuses on the whole HPC market, across the government, academic, and industrial sectors. In 2015 industrial buyers comprised 43.2 percent of the total HPC market, followed by the government sector with 32.8 percent and academia with 23.9 percent. Server spending in 2015 was the largest component of the HPC market, at 37.1 percent. The next largest was software, at 19.7 percent, followed by storage, at 17.0 percent.
Link to the report: http://www.intersect360.com/industry/reports.php