What Will the Technical HPC Cluster Market Look Like in Five Years?

This IDC study discusses clusters' becoming a mainstream solution for many technical server users due to the strong price/performance provided by high-volume commodity components. Clusters currently represent 30% of the technical server market in yearly sales revenue and within a few years will likely represent more than half of the server sales.

"In the future, the commoditization of technical clusters may go as far as having the replacement 'box' being the latest hardware node currently being manufactured. Once the cluster system can invisibly handle a broad mix of CPUs, memory, node types, and so forth, vendors can reduce their spares to near zero. A vendor could decide to only ship the current version of the node boxes and throw away the ones that fail. When a node box fails in the field, the vendor simply ships whichever box is currently being manufactured and doesn't worry about the exact CPU type or speed. Imagine the cost savings and the resulting reduction in prices. This may lead to the next wave of disruption in the technical HPC server market." — Earl Joseph II, research vice president, IDC Technical Computing Systems Group