Intersect360 Research Releases New Report on HPC Applications Annual Site Census Details Growth and Increasing Diversity in Business Computing Applications, Including Open Source Software

Newly segmented market research reveals a stable and mature technical computing segment with opportunities to expand, as well as a plethora of new HPC opportunities in business computing, according to Intersect360 Research’s 2014 HPC User Site Census: Applications. The research firm segmented their research into High Performance Business Computing (HPBC) and High Performance Technical Computing (HPTC) super segments, more than tripling the amount of unique software packages tracked by adding more than 340, for a total of 496.

About three-fourths of HPTC packages and nine-tenths of HPBC packages are mentioned only once in the survey, indicating the diversity of application needs and the experimental nature of the HPC market. Both sets of applications are included in the report, with details on HPTC applications such as structural mechanics, computational fluid dynamics, and weather/environmental modeling, as well as HPBC applications such as financial analysis, business intelligence, and MapReduce-based applications.

Intersect360 Research recommends that system vendors work to support applications through a multi-stage process, including basic programming support, development of applications support staff, porting of major codes, and development of vertical market expertise.

“Open Source applications have been growing in importance, including and especially among commercial HPC users,” reports Chief Research Officer Christopher Willard, Ph.D. “This is a new and changing trend—Open Source was the leading source of programs with 38% of mentions. About 90% of the open source codes were reported by academic and government sites.”

This report is part of Intersect360 Research’s HPC User Site Census series, and provides an examination of the primary application software found at a sample of HPC user sites. A broad range of users were surveyed about their current computer system installations, storage systems, networks, middleware, and applications software supporting these computer installations. The findings allow the research firm to examine suppliers, products, and primary usage of the application software packages in use at all HPC sites.

This report compliments information detailed in another report in the Site Census series, HPC User Site Census: Middleware, which was released in April 2014 and covered developer tools, job schedulers, and resource management.

Source: Intersect360 Research