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HPC 2015-16 | Market Research


Software critical to HPC’s future


Robert Roe discusses the trends that will shape high-performance computing over the coming years


In recent years, the HPC server market has been dominated by x86 processors. However, this looks set to change, as a number of new compute architectures from ARM and IBM, specifically designed for HPC, are taking shape and gaining traction across the high- performance computing market. Te HPC market is also seeing a period


of invigoration driven by technological developments such as the cloud, and home- grown HPC technology. All of these are interwoven with a change to a more data- centric model of computing, which focuses on data availability and movement rather than pure computational power. Finally, governments across the globe


are realising the economic benefit that HPC provides, not only in academia and defence, but also many industry sectors. Tis has seen


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HPC centres and governments alike redefine the usage of HPC systems to improve economic competitiveness. Tis shiſt in HPC architectures inevitably


has an impact on the market share of the various companies vying for the HPC server market. Steve Conway, research vice president of High Performance Computing at the market-research company IDC, said: ‘More than 80 per cent of the systems sold each year by revenue are based on x86 processors, but there has also been demand for IBM POWER processors and ARM based processors. Tere are still vendors that have RISC supercomputers: Fujitsu is the one for the K computer – that is their own version of the SPARC processor that they are using. In China, there are at least half a dozen home- grown processor initiatives.’ Addison Snell, chief executive officer, and CEO of Intersect360 Research said: ‘We see


a lot of adoption of many core technologies, whether you think of them as processors, co-processors, or accelerators depending on GPU computing or Xeon Phi’.


The rise of many/multi core Te proliferation of compute accelerators and many core processing technologies over the past few years enables programmers to pursue parallelism on a scale that was impossible just a few years ago. Tis drive to extend the parallelism of HPC applications is becoming increasingly important as the scaling of transistor size runs up against the hard limits imposed by materials science. As Moore’s law slows down, programmers and hardware developers alike must increasingly look to increase performance through parallelisation rather than increasing clock speed. Snell continued: ‘We predicted at the


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