IDC is gearing up for their next HPC User’s Forum in Richmond, Virginia where they bring in folks from industry, vendors, and academia to talk about what’s happening in the HPC space.  In preparation, they recently released their “Top 10 HPC Predictions for 2012”, summarized in the slide above.  InsideHPC has the story.

However, I’m disappointed to not see a single mention of data analysis or visualization in the entire presentation.  Lots of stuff about dealing with large data from a network interconnect and storage angles, but nothing about actually performing any kind of analysis on this data.  I attended the HPC User Forum a few years ago as a presenter on data analysis in the DoD HPCMP, and was disappointed even then that there was no discussion about analysis requirements.  Seems they still haven’t learned their lesson.

My own predictions for HPC, with an Analysis angle:

  1. Many users will realize that their existing analysis tools won’t scale.
  2. These users will continue  to run their existing tools, failing to take advantage of larger compute capabilities.
  3. The groups running these machines will wonder why their Petascale systems are still full of 1024-core jobs, and have a hard time securing funding for further research and development of bigger/better HPC’s.
The few exceptions to this will be agencies that have already begun their Exascale work (like the DoE) that have embraced tools like ParaView and VisIt.
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IDC’s 2012 Predictions Pave Way for Next HPC User Forum | insideHPC.com.

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