HPC and Containers – An Intriguing Combination

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.

At SC17 in Denver, the Japanese RIKEN K computer emerged for the third straight time as the world's most powerful supercomputer based on the High Performance Conjugate Gradient (HPCG) benchmark list. Although China's Tianhe-2 supercomputer has been widely seen as number one in the world based on its LINPAC rating, the HPCG test that the K computer excelled on may be more representative of the range of real-world HPC problems encounter by users. Riken's K computer has been either number one or two since the HPCG list came out in 2014.