HPC 2015-16 | Market Research
segment of the market is very low volume and is unlikely to see much growth. ‘Te other is the notion of bursting over-
peak capacity. I run along at 90 to 95 per cent of peak capacity all the time and then, for a short amount of time, I need a lot of additional capacity. It is not worth it for me
“Intel is incorporating more of the value stream into its processing architectures”
to buy that capacity because I only need it for a short time, so I go out to the cloud,’ Snell said. Snell stressed that cloud computing
has been adopted more wholeheartedly by some specific groups of users, particularly academia and government. ‘In the commercial markets, pharmaceutical is probably the farthest down this path and potentially finance behind that,’ stated Snell. While cloud can provide potentially
unlimited computing power whenever and wherever it is needed, there are some adjustments that need to be made to encourage adoption specifically within the HPC market. Conway stressed that use of cloud HPC is rising, but questions the potential adoption of the technology,
explaining that it is currently of limited use to the HPC market because of the public cloud architecture. Conway said: ‘Most of the public clouds
are set up to manage embarrassingly parallel workloads, and so users are smart: they will send those embarrassingly parallel workloads off to the cloud and handle the other, less parallel, workloads in house or some other way.’ Embarrassingly, parallel problems require little or no communication of results between tasks, which makes them much more suited to a cloud with limited interconnect speeds and I/O throughput. ‘If public clouds had architectures that
were more friendly to a larger portion of HPC workloads, then inevitably a larger portion of HPC workloads would be sent to the cloud,’ Conway concluded.
Intel vs the world Te increase in the number and scope of different compute architectures available to the HPC market will affect Intel. However, although in the short term it may lose some market share, it is in such a dominant position that this will be unlikely to affect its overall business. Snell said: ‘Intel found itself in a strange
position where it had a thoroughly dominant market share but people thought of their processors as commodity technology
that was not so important to the overall ecosystem. Te reality is that this was a critical technology for all of these systems.’ Snell explained that Intel has developed
a strategy which centres on integrating functionality from other areas of the HPC hardware stack into its processors, in order to bring these elements closer to the computation. A knock-on effect of this is that Intel can take a much higher share of the HPC value stream as a result, even if it were to lose a portion of its market share. Snell said: ‘Intel is capitalising on its
position by incorporating more of the value stream and hooking it into its processing architectures. Tey are integrating the I/O stacks, certain areas of the middleware layer, networking components and the like, in order to have a competitive advantage around the entire Intel ecosystem.’ However this strategy is in direct
competition with many competing technologies in the HPC space, particularly interconnect and accelerator manufacturers, such as Mellanox and Nvidia. ‘Tat strategy threatens people who have competing technologies in that part of the space. Natural allies for OpenPOWER are going to be people who compete in other areas of the value stream,’ said Snell. Snell stated: ‘What would be interesting
would be a situation in which OpenPOWER reaches a 20 to 25 per cent share of the market; you could get a situation where both sides claim a victory.’ He explained a potential scenario where IBM takes a relatively small
“Intel could still win, even if it loses market share initially”
market share from Intel, but at the same time Intel increases its revenues by capitalising on more of the hardware stack. OpenPOWER would be looking at how
much market share it had gained in the ecosystem but, on the other hand, Intel could go from a position where it has 90 to 95 per cent share of the market which it collects 15 per cent of the rent, to having 75 per cent of a market where it collects 30 per cent of the rent.’
Tis leaves Intel potentially in a very
strong position, with increased technological development of new technologies built up around an established, dominant processor technology. Te strength of the CPU in the HPC market gives Intel a secure foothold,
22
McIek /
Shutterstock.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36