The market for HPC servers has doubled over the last five years, and the market is also evolving. At the start of 2003, the ratio of non-clustered to clustered solutions was 80:20. By the end of 2006 it was 40:60.

Other dominant trends are that X86 and Linux® are the current "HPC winners". (In relational databases, for example, Linux is the biggest growth area, with projected growth almost 3x that of Windows®.) Grid technologies are expected to become pervasive. There will be major new entrants at the low end, where Microsoft® and deskside supercomputers will drive growth. Multi-core, lower prices and scalability issues (combined with limitations on power, cooling and floor space) will make the next revolution harder than the last. Storage and data management will grow in importance. And software will be the #1 roadblock at all levels including compliers, applications, middleware and system management.

• Clusters are still hard to use and manage due to power, cooling and floor space issues; third party software costs; weak interconnect performance at all levels; applications and programming; reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS) issues; storage and data management; and multi-processor type support and accelerator support.
• Requirements are diverging. At the high-end, users need more and more; while in the mid and lower end, mainstream users are looking more for complete solutions.
• Parallel software is missing for most users, and will get weaker in the near future as software becomes the #1 roadblock, and multi-core causes many issues to "hit the wall".

Common trends in these markets include the importance of price/performance in an open, commodity world; the gaps between actual and theoretical performance, and between the complexity of Linux and clusters and the ease-of-use of UNIX®; and the fusion of compute-intensive and data-intensive applications.

The fastest growing segment of the HPC market is systems costing less than US$1 million. X86-based clusters account for more than half of annual sales - a market where, with SGI® Altix® XE, we compete very effectively. And, while Linux-based systems account for around three-quarters of the market, there is no clear leader in "production Linux" - a position SGI is uniquely placed to occupy.

In HPB, data volumes are doubling every nine months; the database market (particularly for Linux) continues to grow; and the requirements for fast, very large (TB) databases is creating a need for in-memory databases on a scale that only SGI Altix 4700 can fulfil.

Our customers are the focus for everything we do. Moving forward, we will deliver scalable, flexible and open compute and storage platforms designed for performance, RAS and power efficiency - including standalone or hybrid computing models. We will continue to serve our classic HPC markets, while expanding into HPB. And we will develop an increasing base of solutions such as hybrid computing, ISLE and packaged applications - all wrapped together by our Professional Services organisation.

Bo Ewald, CEO, SGI