HPC User Site Census: System Suppliers — April 2017

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The HPC User Site Census: Systems report, part of Intersect360 Research’s Site Census series, provides a detailed examination of the server systems installed
at a sample of High Performance Computing user sites. We surveyed a broad range of users about their current computer system installations, storage
systems, networks, middleware, and the applications software supporting these computer installations.
 
The goal in this analysis of HPC system suppliers is to examine the installations by supplier and to examine supplier penetration by sector and by region
within the HPC user community.
 
Key findings of this Site Census survey include the following: 
 
Dell EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and Lenovo were the top-named vendors out of
40 in Intersect360 Research’s total site database. The top five named vendors (also including SGI and Cray) captured 52% of the systems market.
HPE continues to gain momentum in the HPC market. With its acquisition of SGI (completed
in Q4 2016), the combined share could account for more than 20% of all reported installations in next year’s study.
Dell EMC had a significantly higher share (17.5%) at academic sites while HPE had the highest
share (25.9%) of installations at commercial sites. For the government sector, SGI had the highest share for named suppliers with 12.2%.
In North America, Dell EMC had the highest share of systems installed, while Lenovo had
the most in EMEA and HPE had the highest share for named suppliers in Asia-Pacific.
Dell EMC had the most server nodes installed, followed by HPE and Lenovo. Dell EMC and HPE
had very similar distributions of systems by node count with 85% or more of their systems having 512 nodes or less. Outliers (i.e., systems with 2,000
or more nodes) were excluded.
 
 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY 1
TABLE OF CONTENTS 2
TECHNOLOGIES COVERED IN THIS REPORT 4
INTRODUCTION 5
RESULTS AND ANALYSIS 6
Servers Installed Over Time 7
Servers Installed by Supplier and Sector 9
Servers Installed by Supplier and Region 10
Server Nodes Installed by Supplier 11
CONCLUSIONS 13
APPENDIX A: ADDITIONAL VENDOR DATA 15
APPENDIX B: METHODOLOGY 17
Survey Methodology 17
Methodology Notes 17
Demographics 19

 

COMPANIES MENTIONED IN THIS REPORT

Advanced Clustering Technologies
Advanced HPC
Amazon Web Services
Atipa
Atos
Cirrascale
Citrix
ClusterVision
Colfax
Cray
Creative Consultants
Dell EMC
E4 Computer Engineering
Eurotech
Exxact
Fujitsu
Generic
GenOuest
Google
HPE
IBM
ICC
In-house
Inspur
Intel
Lenovo
Megware
Micron
Microway Technology
NEC
Nvidia
Oracle
Penguin Computing
Proline
RSC
Scherm do Brasil
Seneca
SGI
Silicon Mechanics
SuperMicro
Transtec
Xenon systems

 
 

TECHNOLOGIES COVERED IN THIS REPORT

HPC system elements
Systems, clusters
HPC clusters
Supercomputers
SMPs
Vector-based systems
MPP systems
Server technologies
Rack-mounted servers
Blades
Memory configurations
Processor elements
System processors
x86 processors
RISC processors
ARM processors
Vector processors
Other processors
Accelerators and co-processors
GPU computing
FPGAs
Other accelerators or co-processors
Hybrid (accelerated) system processors (e.g., Intel MIC, AMD Fusion)
Cloud computing, grid computing, utility computing
Public cloud technologies
Private cloud technologies