HP tops in supercomputer market share

IDC announced last week that HP is the worldwide leader in high-performance technical computing for 2002.

According to the company’s study, “Worldwide High Performance Systems Technical Computing Census 2002,” HP has a 34% revenue share. The next-highest performer is IBM with 29%.

The high-performance technical computing market includes HP’s AlphaServer SC system, which IDC Vice President Chris Willard said contributed to its market share. HP also has high-performance clusters, which potentially represent areas of future growth for the company.

In the technical enterprise segment, HP had a 53% market share, and in the technical department segment the company had a 35% share. Technical enterprise servers, IDC says, sell for $1 million or more. HP’s entry in this segment is its Superdome. Technical departmental servers, on the other hand, sell for less than $250,000. They are represented by HP’s Intel-based Linux clusters, and the company’s Itanium 2-based servers.

IDC says the total high-performance technical computing market was $4.7 billion for 2002.

HP also has the most supercomputers on the TOP500 Supercomputer Sites list, maintained by the University of Tennessee, University of Mannheim and the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories. The TOP500 list was started in 1993 to track issues in supercomputing.

On this list, HP has 159 entries, including 127 HP Superdome entries and 21 HP AlphaServer systems. An Itanium 2 server cluster, made up of rx2600 servers, also made the list. The No. 2 entry on the TOP500 list is an HP AlphaServer SC called ASCI-Q.

HP’s servers are used for a variety of applications, including computer-aided engineering, electronic design automation, geographic information systems, life sciences and weather and climate modeling.

The complete listing of TOP500 Supercomputer Sites is available at http://www.top500.org