Entries filed under “Business of HPC”

PORTLAND, OREGON – January 17, 2013 – insideHPC LLC, parent company of the industry leading High Performance Computing (HPC) news site, insideHPC.com, along with its sister publications inside-Bigdata, inside-Cloud and inside-Startups, today announced a year of record growth for 2012.

Combined, the four inside* publications achieved 35% growth year-over-year in 2012. With readership continuing to rise each month, company advertising revenue has more than doubled since being acquired by HPC industry veteran Rich Brueckner in 2010.

I am both thrilled and humbled that insideHPC has seen such tremendous growth both in terms of readers and advertisers,” said Rich Brueckner, president of insideHPC LLC. “We continually survey our readers to ensure we are providing content and a format that meets the needs of the community. Our short format approach and uncluttered look has been applauded along with our wide use of rich media, and I have no doubt is contributing to our growth and success.”

The other publications owned and managed by Brueckner have achieved similar impressive results for 2012. Inside-Bigdata targets readers of commercial computing environments and enterprise computing where data intensive challenges are paramount. Inside-Cloud formed many partnerships soon after being launched and is an important media channel for many organizations in Cloud computing. And the company’s youngest publication, inside-Startups, has attracted the attention of companies throughout the country as they look to get exposure for their entrepreneurial ventures.

Recently, Brueckner was named by Forbes magazine as one of the Top 20 Big Data Influencers. As the industry continues to embrace data-intensive computing and the use of business analytics, Brueckner anticipates tremendous growth for the inside-BigData publication in 2013 and beyond.

As both a data scientist and an investor closely watching emerging trends in advanced computing, I have come to rely on the inside* publications – from inside-startups to insideHPC – as key channels for maintaining an insider’s perspective on market dynamics and companies to watch,” said Thomas Thurston, Partner, Ironstone Group and CEO, Growth Science.

“The HPC market continues to expand,” said Brueckner. “A number of our sponsors including Mellanox and ScaleMP announced record growth in 2012, and we’d like to think we helped make that possible. In 2013, the storage vendors we work with are especially bullish on how the Big Data trend will help them grow as well.

Intersect360 Research recently surveyed the HPC user community to learn more about how High Performance Computing sites divide and spend their budgets. Now that their HPC Budget Allocation Map report is out, I caught up with CEO Addison Snell to learn more.

insideHPC: You’ve been doing this survey for five years now, do the results vary greatly from year to year?

Addison Snell: I’m pleased to say that for the most part we see consistency from year to year, which lets us know that we’re on the right track with the industry averages and trends, since the answers aren’t bouncing randomly all over the place. Of course, the individual site response vary greatly, but the averages work out consistently. And that way we can confidently isolate real changing trends when we see them, such as the slowdown in public sector spending on HPC over the past few years.

insideHPC: From the most-recent survey, what has changed from the 10,000-foot level?

Addison Snell: For the previous few years, we had seen a steady decline in the percent of budget that got allocated to hardware (systems, storage, networks, etc.), as other categories, like facilities, were on the rise. 2012 saw a sudden reversal in that trend, with hardware spiking up at the expense of all other categories, across all sectors. Likely we’re seeing a rebound effect of delayed capital expenditures, after organizations suffered through a few years of frugality in the recessionary climate.

insideHPC: You surveyed users on their spending in top-level categories including: hardware, software, facilities, staffing, services, and cloud/utility computing. Is cloud spending on the increase in the HPC space?

Addison Snell: If you’re talking about public cloud models, it really isn’t, and this has been consistent for the past few years. We do see some cloud spending, but nothing widespread. Most of the growth is coming from private cloud models.

insideHPC: In your Site Budget Allocation Map, servers lead spending in the hardware category, followed by storage and networks. Is the ratio of these three elements starting to change in these days of data-intensive computing?

Addison Snell: Storage is clearly the fastest-growing product sector, and we don’t expect that to change over the course of our forecast period. We could see an increase in high-performance networks too. The server is still a dominant component (especially with more and more memory getting packed into them), but a lot of technology change is going on “outside the box.”

insideHPC: Was facility spending included in the report? In general, does the cost of power and cooling for most HPC sites get paid for from someone else’s budget?

Addison Snell: Internal items like facilities and personnel are definitely included in the report, including an analysis of how often these come from outside the HPC budget, and how much they cost when they don’t. 38% of the time, the HPC budget doesn’t include facilities costs (power, cooling, floor space); someone else pays for it. We analyze this a few different ways in order to gain a full understanding of how facilities costs could play into acquisitions.

But for all the attention on facilities, personnel is actually the bigger internal spending category. And with multi-core and heterogeneous computing, tasks like system administration, programming, and optimization are getting more complicated, so we expect personnel costs aren’t going anywhere.

insideHPC: From an HPC vendor standpoint, what trends from the Site Budget Allocation Map represent good news and increased revenue opportunities for the future?

Addison Snell: The biggest good news is that budget expectations — the outlook for 2013 and 2014 — have improved noticeably, and this has been a good indicator of future spending. We’re still going to see softness in government in academia, and in Europe relative to other geographies, but overall, business should be picking up. Things are looking better!

Today D3 Applied Technologies announced that the company has selected CIARA Technologies of Montreal as their primary technology systems provider. D3 Applied Technologies will make use of the CIARA products for doing high fidelity computational fluid dynamics simulations in order to enable engineers to predict the performance and optimize their products providing as well a greater insight into previously hard to study areas.

The computational fluid dynamics, CFD, simulations we run at D3 are very high resolution and therefore extremely demanding,” said Gonzalo Redondo, CEO of D3 Applied Technologies. “Thanks to CIARA, the time required to converge them has been reduced by a factor of four by making use of our NEXXUS C cluster featuring InfiniBand and SSD disks. Thanks to the integrated liquid cooling there is no need for external air conditioning units that would increase power demand significantly. It is still fascinating looking at it knowing this piece of hardware has become our best wind tunnel.”

Redondo founded D3 Applied Technologies in 2012. With know-how acquired as design members of America’s Cup and Volvo Ocean Race design teams, the company already has a well-established portfolio in the maritime industry. Read the Full Story.