Much has changed in a year. Last year, a number of companies such as Orion were on the rise and the darlings of the event. Companies such as my former employer SGI had a strong presence, reasonable revenues, and there were thoughts of a possible turn around. Startups that garnered far less attention than they deserved, such as Ammasso were there in a limited fashion. Other startups (mercifully unamed) that had something of a flash-in-the-pan quality to them seemed abundant.

Please look for us at SC05. I’ll be there with a camera and we have a nice site ready to display photos. Some changes from last year. Orion is not in ascendance. Ammasso is out of the game. The buzz is all around FPGAs (just wait until someone tries to port “hello world” .c to it, but thats another matter). Intel has an x86_64 chip line out. Go figure.

Its a very big HPC world. According to IDC and others, its a $7B+/year world, growing at a nice healthy clip, 10-20% CAGR, again, depending upon which market research report you read. Seems like a hot market… right? Well … sort of. The largest growth (>15% CAGR) is in the 10-25k$US region (small computing engines), with the higher end stuff coming in at a somewhat anemic (~5% CAGR) rate. Still, a 5% growth rate in a market this large is nothing to sneeze at.