HP’s new global business segment will focus on big data and high-performance computing with oil and gas as one of its key target growth areas
William Mannel, vice-president of HPC and big data business unit at HP, told HPCwire that he believes there is more opportunity to further expand in the HPC market as more companies of different sizes adopt technologies for big data.
“It’s not by mistake or coincidence we put HPC and big data together. We believe storing big data is one thing and we have technologies to do that. Getting productive use out of the data is another thing and many customers are using similar types of technologies to get value out of their big data.”
HP seeks to leverage its expansion in the HPC market with the launch of a portfolio of servers dubbed Apollo, the report added.
The Apollo 8000 server is one of the platforms under the product line that has been adopted by the US energy department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory for its Peregrine supercomputer and Poland-based AGH University of Science and Technology for its Prometheus computing platform.
Mannel told HPCwire that the HPC unit has a group of applications engineers who collaborate with independent software vendors and end users before and after sale and works to provide clients with alternative options to HPC adoption.
“We provide for a number of very large customers as well as smaller customers the ability to essentially get HPC on tap,” Mannel revealed.
“If they don’t want to build their own HPC data centre because of space constraints or lack of expertise, we’ll set up customers with access to HPC resources we control.”
IDC, which has adopted the HPDA acronym (high performance data analysis), has reported 67 percent of HPC sites use HPDA today and forecast the 2016 HPDA server and storage market at US$1.2bn and US$800mn respectively and growing faster than most segments.
