A Regional View of the HPC Server Market

Worldwide factory revenue for the high-performance computing (HPC) technical server market jumped for the full-year 2018 by 15.6% over the exceptionally strong 2017 calendar year period to $13.7 billion. The 2018 result was 6.2% higher than Hyperion Research's forecast $12.9 billion figure for the year.

The Department of Energy at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) recently announced plans for the development of a 1.5 exaflops system called Frontier to be delivered in 2021. US HPC maker Cray and chip maker AMD are the two key US commercial partners in this effort. Despite numerous press articles centered on the 1.5 exaflops peak performance of Frontier, ORNL's original RFP released in April of 2018 clearly called out the diverse workload requirements that Frontier would have to successfully handle that span the traditional modeling and simulation sector, big data analysis, and AI applications, while demonstrating a 50X improvement in solving key DOE science problems that today run at the 20 petaflops level. To meet those ambitious goals, strong support from DOE's companion $1.7 billion Exascale Computing Project (ECP) will be critical.