New Delhi and Mumbai, November 5, 2008 – In a first-time collaborative effort across the Asia/Pacific region, IDC and program partners Cisco, HP, Intel and Microsoft have organised a multi-city roadshow to share the latest HPC (High Performance Computing) market trends, data and examples of how HPC is being used today in sites ranging from leading government and university centres to business and industrial firms to produce faster, superior innovation and solutions. This is part of IDC's Integrated Marketing Programmes offering, which is a collaborative approach to leverage and integrate IDC's suite of products and services to provide powerful solutions to meet clients' needs for marketing intelligence and go-to-market and external communications. 

"Asia/Pacific is home to some of the world's largest HPC installations and is the fastest growing HPC market worldwide, propelled by strong demand from the PRC, India, Korea and Australia," said Rajnish Arora, Director, Enterprise Server Research, IDC Asia/Pacific. "The availability of commodity building blocks for HPC such as multi-core x86 Servers, and operating systems such as Linux and now Windows should help to constantly open up new market segments for HPC solutions."

"Seismic analysis and reservoir simulation by petroleum services companies, digital content creation and rendering, and basic sciences research are among the key applications fuelling the HPC demand in Asia/Pacific," added Rajnish. "With Asia increasingly becoming the manufacturing hub for the global economy, EDA and CAD/CAM solutions will also contribute significantly to the strong HPC demand over the next several years."

According to IDC's Worldwide High-Performance Technical Server Qview, factory revenue and unit shipments for the High Performance Computing (HPC) technical server market exhibited 10% growth in the second quarter (2Q 2008). Revenues grew 10% over the first quarter* and 4% compared to the same period last year to reach US$ 2.5 billion in the second quarter. Shipments of server system units in the 2Q 2008 HPC market totalled 45,000, down 5% from the first quarter. The second quarter saw solid growth in the mid and high end of the market and softness in lower priced x86 servers, as evidenced by average selling prices (ASPs) that were up 16% compared to 1Q 2008. The 2Q 2008 HPC server revenue leaders were HP with 37% market share, IBM with 27%, and Dell with 16%.

"Powered by their price/performance advantage, clusters now dominate all segments of the HPC market. In addition, the HPC market is seeing a shift towards fatter nodes as multicore technology becomes pervasive. This is also driving requirements for larger and faster memories, along with improved interconnection technologies," said Jie Wu, Research Manager, Technical Computing, IDC's WW High Performance Computing Group.

The HPC portion of the overall server market follows a different pattern due to the nature of spending on R&D projects. Because government and university buyers have longer-term budget cycles that are not immediately impacted by economic slowdowns, economic shifts typically take more than a year to work their way into these budgets. In addition, many industrial buyers are still investing in R&D to improve their competitiveness in the tighter economy. IDC is closely watching the market to see when the broader economic softness begins to impact HPC spending. 

About "HPC is Going Mainstream" High Productivity Computing Series 2008

Join senior IDC HPC analyst Jie Wu, Research Manager, Technical Computing, IDC's WW High Performance Computing Group and Sankalp Shrie, Senior Manager, Computing Products Research, IDC India at this event as they discuss the fast-growing HPC marketplace and explain why 97% of IDC-surveyed businesses that have adopted HPC say they can no longer compete or survive without it.

For more information about the event, please visit http://www.idcindia.com/events/HPC/hpc.html.

If you would like to arrange for an interview with IDC's analysts or any of the conference speakers, please contact Kanchan Rawat at +91-9811375937 
(E-mail: krawat@idcindia.com).

For more information, on IDC's HPC report offerings contact:

Vishaal Bhatnagar
Associate Vice President
Go-To-Market Services
IDC (India) Limited
Tel: +91-124-2384816, 4031234 Ext. 228
E-mail: vbhatnagar@idcindia.com