by Michael Feldman, HPCwire Editor
One challenge for IBM will be to decide what roles its current server architectures play in the upcoming decade. Today, the company offers three basic platforms: its various flavors of x86 clusters, the Blue Gene architecture, and Power-based systems. That mix enables the company not only to own a big chunk of the overall HPC server market — 26 percent in 2008, according to IDC — but also to claim a dominant position in creating the top supercomputing systems in the world.
According to Dave Turek, vice president for Deep Computing at IBM, even though the commercial (read mainstream) HPC market is growing faster than the cutting edge systems, it’s commitment to elite supercomputing remains strong. The rationale is that investments in high-end technology, both hardware and software, will trickle down to mid-range and low-end systems. For example, advancements in water cooling technology, which used to be a feature only in top-of-the-line machines, have spread into mainstream servers like IBM’s iDataPlex offerings. In fact, Turek expects the investments at the high end will reap greater benefits in the future than they have in the past, simply because the base of opportunity will grow more dramatically.
