The High Flop Counts v Efficiency Challenge

Today, HPCWire outlined some highlighs of IDC’s just released Worldwide High-Performance Technical Server QView Report, which provides numerical results on the worldwide sales into the technical computing market, with details on the purchases by competitive segments, by regions, by processor types, and more. It is useful for vendors to better understand the HPC infrastructure, and future plans for spending on HPC-related hardware and software at HPC end-user sites.

Some highlights from the report, as well as pertinent comments from IDC’s RVP Bob Sorenson:

• IDC’s worldwide technical server market grew more than 10 percent on a year-over-year basis to more than $2.5B for Q1 2015 versus Q1 2014.
• Lenovo, obtained the third place behind HP and Dell, while IBM fell from second to fourth likely due to the sale of IBM’s x86 business.
• Sorenson says “The HPC sector is currently looking to serve two somewhat distinct masters; the traditional compute-centric modeling and simulation space where high flops counts are king, and the rapidly growing HPDA (high performance data) space where considerations of efficient and effective data movement is the critical performance metric.

Check out the link to IDC above for access to the full report.