Department of Energy Announces Request for Proposal for Exascale Computing Platforms to be Delivered Starting in 2021

Hyperion Research recently closed the books on the 2018 year for the high performance computing market in our market tracking database, the QView, as well as the Country Level Database, which tracks the HPC markets in 26 countries around the world as well as 13 different verticals. 2018 was another high growth year, with the server market reaching $13.7 billion, and the total market (servers, storage, software and technical support service) totaling more than $27.6 billion. The market has continued to grow at a steady rate of around 6% for the past 5 years.

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.