The increasing drumbeat tapping out news of IBM unloading all or part of their System x (x86-based servers) business onto Lenovo got me wondering about the HPC implications. What’s the possible impact on IBM, and the HPC market, if Big Blue dumps the x86 end of their system business?
These systems are big business, albeit at margins ranging from low to extremely low. As our pal TPM points out here, IBM has never been good at low-margin lines of business. However, IBM is pretty good at HPC, and HPC is a market where bunches of low-cost boxes are combined to build the largest, and some of the most expensive, systems in the world. And the innovations that drive HPC performance eventually find their way into enterprise and even consumer tech products.
It’s impossible to find good numbers on exactly how many HPC systems and individual models are in use today. In fact, it’s increasingly difficult to differentiate an HPC workload vs. an enterprise compute-intensive or Big Data workload. (I’d argue that they’re the same thing, with the only difference being the data they’re analyzing and the questions they’re answering.)
Since I couldn’t get solid numbers for analysis of the entire market, I worked over the latest Top500 list to see what’s what at the high end of HPC. As a system vendor, IBM has more systems (193, or 39%) on the Top500 list than any of their competitors. HP is in second place with 146 systems for a 29% share. IBM’s lead gets larger when you look at performance. Total Petaflop/s of IBM’s systems on the list equals 66.216 vs. Cray’s second place showing of 28.189 Pflop/s.
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