ENGINEERING

Traditional HPC Total Market Forecast: 2010 to 2014 predicts CAGR of 7.8 percent

The traditional high performance computing (HPC) industry will be worth $21.8 billion by the year 2014 predicts Intersect360 Research in its newly released Traditional HPC Total Market Forecast: 2010 to 2014. The market research and consulting firm anticipates the HPC market growing at a compound annual growth rate of 7.8 percent for the next five years.

The higher-than-usual increase is a sign of the industry's return to growth after a 21 percent contraction in 2009, and is indicative of a wider rebound, according to Intersect360 Research Chief Research Officer Christopher G. Willard, Ph.D.

"Similar to machine tools, HPC spending happens early in the design cycle of a business," said Willard. "Assuming that world economies continue to come back online, we see strong growth for the HPC market, driven in large part by pent-up demand for product development and design tools." End-user survey data on HPC spending indicates that much of the industry's growth in the next few years will be concentrated outside of server sales, specifically in storage and software. "This is reflective of the increasing pace of differentiation in technologies beyond the computational system hardware," said Intersect360 Research CEO Addison Snell.

Adds Snell, "The only way to understand the total market is to examine all of the different product and services sectors -- including storage, networks, and software. These major spending areas contain key investment opportunities for vendors seeking growth in HPC."

Growth Opportunities

The report defines several specific sectors that offer the largest opportunities for expansion in the next few years. Significant growth will come from the mid-range and entry-level segments of the market, according to Willard. "These segments hold a larger pool of convertible and found problems, which lead to green-field opportunities."

HPC vendors should also look to the European markets, said Willard. "We believe that, even starting from a larger base, these markets hold similar growth opportunities to the highly touted Asia- Pacific markets, and they may be more stable."

Traditional HPC

Intersect360 Research defines HPC as the use of servers, clusters, and supercomputers -- plus associated software, tools, components, storage, and services -- for scientific, engineering, or analytical tasks that are particularly intensive in computation, memory usage, or data management. At the highest level, Intersect360 Research divides the HPC market into "traditional HPC" -- systems used by scientists and engineers in research, development, and production across industry, government, and academia, and "edge HPC" -- systems used to address applications that have essential supercomputing characteristics but which lie outside the traditional bounds of scientific and engineering computing.

The HPC Total Market Forecast: 2010 to 2014 focuses on the traditional HPC portion of the market, which represents about two-thirds of the total HPC market by product spending.