IDC Makes HPC and Storage Predictions

By Doug Barney

Research firm IDC of Framingham, MA recently laid out its predictions for this year in the worlds of high performance computing and storage.

Let’s tackle HPC first. IDC expects the overall market to grow strongly, and get more competitive. Any college freshman who has read economist Paul Samuelson knows this is a recipe for lower prices and technical innovation. This atmosphere may help drive our fastest computers into the petaflop range (not that most of us will be able to afford these babies!).

Some may wonder why IDC is predicting petaflop systems will happen, when some press releases claim they already have happened. For instance, IBM last year said its Blue Gene/P supercomputer operates at a petaflop. The answer is that IDC is talking about the so-called Linpack petaflop benchmark, a more rigorous measure than peak petaflop.

Seeing problems with today’s applications fully exploiting multicore, IDC believes systems and processor will move to accelerator technologies, meaning our systems will be increasingly powered by heterogeneous and specialized processing. This is the way many game systems work today.

The most interesting, and troubling, prediction is the upcoming crisis in software licensing. The problem is that vendors often charge by the core, driving prices up dramatically. Combine that with the fact that extra cores are not usually perfectly utilized, and you easily see the root of the problem. Find out more here.

As reasonable as the HPC predictions sound, the storage prognostications are even more impressive. IDC believes that offsite storage services will gain ground. I use Carbonite, an online backup service, and it is way convenient. As long as you pay your yearly fee, all your data is safe and easily (though perhaps not quickly) fully restored.

The economics are clearly in online/offsite’s favor. It is more cost effective for a company like Carbonite to build and manage a huge storage farm than it is for IT shops to buy their own disks and pay someone inside IT guy to manage them. And how many times have major restores failed?  Might be safe to trust a vendor that restores terabytes upon terabytes every single day.

IDC also thinks that solid-state storage, far more reliable than standard disk, will take off. I agree, as long as the price is right. Apple, for instance, is charging nearly a grand for a 64 gig solid-state drive for its new MacBookPro Air. I can walk down to Best Buy and get several terabytes for that price.

The research house also believes that storage systems will be customized based on roles (such as documents, database, technical drawings,  Web), and therefore will connect more directly the source of the content. Get the full rundown here.