InterSect360TM Market Advisory Service
Supercomputing at the Edge: Non-Traditional High Productivity Computing Segment Definitions

Christopher G. Willard, Ph.D.,
Debra Goldfarb, Addison Snell

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Tabor Research believes that new technologies, methodologies, and applications are emerging outside of the traditional HPC markets that have the essential characteristics of high productivity computing. These requirements include: leading edge capabilities, incorporating, testing, and perfecting of new technologies and methodologies, and market creation and expansion. This HPC market segment is generating a "new edge" by leveraging major technological advances to enable application growth in non-traditional markets. This new area, which we cleverly call Edge HPC (or eHPC), leverages the experience and technologies of the traditional HPC market, while introducing new areas for innovation. Most importantly we believe that eHPC is at the cusp of significant market generation and growth.

Edge HPC includes a wide set of application areas and a diversity of top level requirements. We thus segment the market based on the physical and/or logical features that define and drive the applications. We are initially defining this market in terms of four major segments:

• Complex Event and Business Processing - Applications that are driven by continuous data feeds generated by real world events. The applications enter the HPC realm as requirements to maintain low response latencies in the face of growing data volumes exceed the capabilities of standard solutions. Often times these applications have real-time response requirements and demand highly distributed infrastructure.
• Process Optimization - Applications with profiles that mirror traditional HPC workflows. These applications often make use of technology above and beyond standard enterprise solutions, either in architecture, software, or system management. Applications tend to be data and/or computationally intensive, but run in operational time (i.e. in synchronization with the operational timing of the organization).
• Virtual Infrastructure and Environments - Applications that implement computer network based business and social structures. These structures range from on-line gaming environments, to multi-person/system training environments, to virtual economies, to virtual social environments.
• Ultra-scale Computing - Applications that require systems to be specially designed and/or configured to effectively manage node counts that significantly exceed those provided by industry standard products. Ultra-scale requirements appear across multiple applications spaces, and thus this segment may be viewed, in part, as representing an "Other Applications" category.

Going forward Tabor Research will move to track, size, and forecast this market as part of our InterSect 360 service. We will also continue to identify application areas as they arise and to further hone our definitions of this emerging market.

NEW DIMENSIONS IN HPC

Within the computing industry, the traditional High Productivity Computing (tHPC) market has and continues to act as a generative edge for new technologies and applications. This market area has traditionally been the point where users are pushing advances in system performance and architectures to address problems that range from standard engineering models to those that have been hitherto intractable. This segment is the catalyst for extending computational technologies and methodologies into new and or emerging analytical, scientific and engineering disciplines. In addition, tHPC has acted as a test bed for the IT industry as a whole, where new concepts and technologies are developed and proven and then introduced into larger more mainstream markets.

Tabor Research believes that new technologies, methodologies, and applications are emerging outside of the traditional HPC market that have the essential characteristics of high productivity computing (requirements for leading edge capabilities, incorporating, testing, and perfecting of new technologies and methodologies, and market creation and expansion.) This HPC market segment is generating a "new edge" by leveraging major technological advances to enable applications growth in non-traditional markets. This new area, which we cleverly call Edge HPC (or eHPC), leverages the experience and technology of the Traditional HPC market, while introducing new areas for innovation. Most importantly we believe that eHPC is at the cusp of significant market generation and growth.

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