HECMS releases preliminary numbers from market study

For the fourth consecutive year, HECMS has conducted their SuperComputing User Study. In years past HECMS has collected data from over 100 attendees of the Supercomputing conference. Each one of those attendees is responsible for influencing the HPC purchase decisions at their organizations. This year HECMS has done it again! They have collected enough data to release some preliminary numbers. These numbers are a very small set of those that will be released in a formal market study available by the end of the year. Attendees participating in the study were from a large breadth of the SuperComputing user community. Thirty-five percent of respondents considered themselves a member of the Academic computing vertical. Another major group, at thirty percent, considered themselves a part of the Government vertical. This trend is one HECMS has seen in the past four years. Government and academic research make up a large number of HPC customers. The single greatest application area mentioned by participants in the study was “Life Science” applications, those pertaining to the biology, biochemistry, genomics, or pharmaceuticals. Participants were also asked what operating systems was predominantly installed on their HPC systems. For the first year since HECMS began conducting the annual study, Microsoft for HPC has outpaced Apple's Mac OS/X. While neither claims the market share of Linux, which has 73% of the market, this shows that use of the Microsoft operating system for HPC is growing. Proprietary UNIX operating systems (AIX, Solaris) continue to slump in the face of Linux. Other questions quizzed participants about which vendors they planned to make purchases from in 2008, what CPU architecture they were planning to purchase, a multitude of questions about their storage purchases, and what limitations they are finding with application performance. To view the full question set visit www.hecms.com or contact Tim Little at tlittle@hecms.com.