IDC New Market View: Extreme Computing - Technological Frontiers at HPC and Enterprise Datacenters

This IDC study sets the stage for our new investigations of extreme computing practices by defining the notion of extreme computing, laying out IDC's motivations in calling attention to this category, articulating the market drivers that IDC expects will stimulate extreme computing innovation, and highlighting where IDC will focus our attention this year as we develop the topic in our research. This is an inaugural document offered as a guide to planned IDC coverage of developments at the leading edge of technical and enterprise datacenter computing that may find their way into the market.

According to Earl Joseph, IDC program vice president: "Datacenters have entered a period of difficult, and in some cases disruptive, challenges and are exploring a vast range of new technologies to address these issues."

Commercial and technical datacenters will always have some distinct requirements ? commercial computing is often measured in transactions per second, while a single technical computing problem may take hours, days, weeks, months, or even years to complete ? but the major issues are converging for the two types of datacenters. What's needed to address these daunting issues is innovation. It is the job of IDC's Extreme Computing initiative, in close collaboration with datacenter personnel, users, and vendors, to collect and disseminate information about promising advances in datacenter practices and technologies. IDC expects datacenter challenges to increase in intensity in the near term, but we are confident that the innovations achieved to address these challenges will ultimately transform and define the future of datacenter operations.