20 Years Supercomputer Market Analysis

Since the very beginning of the International Supercomputer Conference (ISC) series, one important focus has been the analysis of the supercomputer market. For 20 years, statistics about this marketplace have been published at ISC. Initially these were based on simple market surveys and since 1993, they are based on the TOP500 project, which has become the accepted standard for such data. We take the occasion of the 20 anniversary of ISC to combine and extend several previously published articles based on these data. We analyze our methodologies for collecting our statistics and illustrate the major developments, trends and changes in the High Performance Computing (HPC) marketplace and the supercomputer market since the introduction of the Cray 1 system. The introduction of vector computers started the area of modern ‘Supercomputing’. The initial success of vector computers in the seventies and early eighties was driven by raw performance. In the second half of the eighties, the availability of standard development environments and of application software packages became more important. Next to performance, these criteria determined the success of MP vector systems especially at industrial customers. Massive Parallel Systems (MPP) became successful in the early nineties due to their better price/performance ratios, which was enabled by the attack of the ‘killer-micros’. In the lower and medium segments of the market MPPs were replaced by microprocessor based symmetrical multiprocessor systems (SMP) in the middle of the nineties. Towards the end of the nineties only the companies which had entered the emerging markets for massive parallel database servers and financial applications attracted enough business volume to be able to support the hardware development for the numerical high end computing market as well. Success in the traditional floating-point intensive engineering applications was no longer sufficient for survival in the market. The success of microprocessor based SMP concepts even for the very high-end systems, was the basis for the emerging cluster concepts in the early 2000s. Within the first half of this decade, clusters of PC’s and workstations have become the prevalent architecture for many HPC application areas in the TOP500 on all ranges of performance. However, the success of the Earth Simulator vector system demonstrated that many scientific applications could benefit greatly from other computer architectures. At the same time, there is renewed broad interest in the scientific HPC community for new hardware architectures and new programming paradigms. The IBM BlueGene/L system is one early example of a shifting design focus for large-scale system. Built with low performance but very low power components, it allows a tight integration of an unprecedented number of processors to achieve surprising performance levels for suitable applications. The DARPA HPCS program has the declared goal of building a PetaFlops computer by the end of the decade using novel computer architectures.