HPC Server Market Explodes to $9.1 Billion in 2005

Published: March 30, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The supercomputer market is hot, hot, hot, according to the latest market figures from IDC. The preliminary statistics compiled by the company indicate the market for supercomputers, which includes parallel supers, clusters, vector machines, and a few other exotic architectures of number-crunching machines, rocketed up by 23 percent to hit a total of $9.1 billion in worldwide sales during 2005.

The entire worldwide server market was comprised of $51.3 billion in sales in 2005, which means that supercomputers accounted for 18 percent of all server sales in the year. The supercomputer market is growing a lot faster than the server market at large, which only grew by 4.4 percent last year. While this growth in supercomputer sales was huge, growth was higher from 2003 to 2004, when revenues shot up by 33 percent to $7.4 billion. Remarkably, supercomputer sales are up by 50 percent since 2002, when worldwide revenues were about $4.9 billion across all architectures and system sizes.

IDC says that sales of clustered systems were growing explosively through 2005, and represented nearly half of all supercomputer revenues by the third quarter of last year. (IDC is still wiggling the numbers for the fourth quarter, and did not give a count for the full year.) IDC says that so-called "capacity computing" machines, which have average selling prices of between $50,000 and $1 million, drove the market growth in 2005, while capability-class and enterprise supers servers (meaning those that cost more dough) both had slight declines. IDC is projecting that capability-class supers, which represent the largest supers in the world, would account for only $900 million in sales in 2005. For more than a decade, these machines have averaged $1 billion in sales worldwide.

The question now is, how long will such large double-digit growth last?