Addison Snell is CEO of Intersect360 Research.
Intersect360 Research has completed its market sizing and new five-year forecast for the High Performance Computing industry, announcing that the total worldwide HPC market grew 3.2% year-over-year, hitting $36 billion in 2018.
As part of its HPC Advisory Service, Intersect360 Research tracks spending on HPC servers, storage, software, networking, services, and cloud computing worldwide. Top-level insights from this year’s forecast include:
- Revenue growth was led by HPC server components, the largest product category, due primarily to end user’s configuring more components within server nodes, including additional processing elements to handle artificial intelligence (AI) workloads in machine learning, as well as an increase in non-volatile memory and storage components.
- Cloud computing for HPC workloads also continued its double-digit growth trajectory, becoming a more prevalent portion of the budget, with $2.17 billion in spending.
- Commercial HPC use cases—already more than 50% of the market by revenue—continued to be the driver of growth, as the public sector sector showed a slight decline. The energy market showed the greatest percentage gain of all vertical markets (8.7% growth year-over-year), while the manufacturing industry, combining automotive/aerospace and consumer product manufacturing, contributed the most absolute revenue growth, with over a quarter of a billion dollars in new revenue to reach $4.77 billion in 2018.
- Growth was concentrated more to the higher end of the market, with supercomputing-class systems (over $1.5 million expenditures) outpacing all categories, and entry-level systems (under $50,000) trailing.
- Growth was relatively evenly spread among geographic regions.
- HPE held the number-one position for HPC server revenue for the sixth straight year, but its gap over number-two Dell EMC has narrowed to a thin margin. Dell EMC also has the number-one revenue share position for storage for HPC applications, ahead of number-two NetApp. Counting all products and services, Dell EMC is the leader in total HPC solutions revenue.
- Based on strong market fundamentals and increases in machine learning and analytics workloads, the worldwide HPC market is forecast to at a compound annual growth rate of 6.8% over the next five years, surpassing $50 billion in spending in 2023.
HPC applications are the ones that matter to innovation and advancement in science, research, and engineering,” said Addison Snell, CEO of Intersect360 Research. “HPC will continue to merit investment as long as people want to do more tomorrow than they do today.”
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In addition, Snell says, the HPC market is continuing to feel the impact of advances in machine learning. “AI workloads are sweeping through all types of enterprises and research, which is affecting both the HPC and Hyperscale markets. In HPC, we’re seeing not only a measurable affect on top-line budget expectations, but also different technology choices being made to accommodate machine learning workloads.”
Data is available immediately to clients of the Intersect360 Research HPC market advisory service. Reports can be purchased individually on the Intersect360 Research website, or as a discounted ten-report package through the Intersect360 Research sales team.
