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July 7, 2008 Article #20033 Volume 125, Issue 2 HPC
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HPC clusters are where the trend is and will continue to be for several years 
HPC and NASA: Spawning Innovations in Their Respective Spaces
Data Loads, Regulation Accelerate New Technologies in HPC
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In his article on current trends in HPC, Chris Preimesberger sees parallels between NASA, whose technology gave rise to satellite television, Velcro, laser pointers and instant fruit drinks, and the HPC segment of IT, from which have sprung such innovations as high-performance disk drives, super-fast I/O channels, petabyte-capacity storage, deduplication, and virtualized servers and storage. He calls HPC the innovation engine of enterprise IT.
No question that it will take the high-flying technology of HPC to meet the requirements of enterprise computing, which increasingly demands faster and more capacious storage systems to accommodate its data loads. Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz sees storage as fertile territory for laborers in the HPC vineyards, as does Platform Computing CEO Songnian Zhou, who points to the increasing interest in cloud computing as a driving force in HPC technology.
"Current data centers, most of them built more than 10 years ago, are costly to run and not very efficient in using power resources," Zhou said. "What IT managers and CIOs need when they are looking to upgrade are agile, scalable, more powerful, more cost-effective servers and storage systems that use more automation, share resources, use less power and run on commodity hardware. Yet these new systems must be able to deliver powerful Web services 24/7. This is what HPC brings to the table."
Reflecting the effect of both those market sectors, the growth rate in HPC as reported by IDC Vice President Earl C. Joseph, executive director of the HPC User Forum, weighing in as an $11.5 billion business in 2007 and growing at a 19.5 percent clip per year.
"This makes HPC by far the fastest-growing sector of IT worldwide," Joseph said. "In fact, we at IDC...are announcing an entire new sector of research: high-performance computing management software."
Another shift in the IT sector lies in the dominance of x86-based server clusters, Priemesberger writes, which, according to Joseph, are now making up more than two-thirds of the data center hardware market. Sales are continuing to grow at 60 percent annual rate. Hewlett-Packard's C-Series and blades from Sun, IBM, Dell and Hitachi are leading the pack.
"Only five years ago," Joseph said, "x86-type servers only occupied a small sliver of the market. The growth there has been nothing short of phenomenal."
Blade servers are powering about 40 percent of all new HPC clustered systems, Joseph observed. "Although x86-powered blades are dominating the data center space, new mainframes—with all their value-added features and improvement—are starting to make a comeback," he said.
And, also in the winds of change, Linux is steadily replacing Unix as the HPC operating system of choice, Joseph said. "Unix systems just aren't being replaced by Unix anymore," he said.
With the new, less expensive servers, the prices per processor have dropped substantially, Joseph said. "Generally, it costs about $2,000 per x86 processor, while RISC-based processors are going for about $7,800," he said. "Itaniums cost about $9,000 each; Vectors are by far the most expensive at about $54,000."
Joseph attributed the changing face of computer manufacturing to the rise of commodity-type hardware, which has changed the lineup of heavy hitters dramatically. HP and IBM are leading the market at about 32 percent market share apiece, followed by Dell (18 percent), Sun (5 percent) and SGI (2 percent). "Only a few years ago, that lineup was very different," Joseph said.
"Don't worry, there's still a lot of good work going on in mainframes, some of which have been around a long time," he said. "But HPC clusters are where the trend is and will continue to be for several years, we believe," he added.
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Other articles in the HPC section of Volume 125, Issue 2:
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HPC and NASA: Spawning Innovations in Their Respective Spaces
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