At what point do servers become HPC beasts?

El Reg barometer survey. Your input needed

By Drew Cullen • Get more from this author

Posted in Servers, 5th November 2009 09:44 GMT

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Tech Panel From time to time, The Register commissions its own "barometer surveys", to gauge the impact of technologies on our readers' working lives

Today, we launch a new barometer survey, to track high-end servers and HPC, or high performance computers, the name by which low- and mid-range supercomputers go by these days. We will run this annually to track market changes, but we need your help to make this a meaningful piece of research.

The lines between big servers used for general purpose computing and high performance computers are blurring: received wisdom is that the technologies are commoditising and coalescing around x86, Linux clustering and virtualization. But does this chime with reality? To many, Linux clusters are still a black art - is this an opportunity for Johny-come-lately Microsoft. Is it really over for Unix platforms and non x86 chips? Where do IBM mainframes sit?

You get the picture. The full survey takes less than 10 minutes to complete and is a tale of two halves. Act 1 explores the server environment and the platforms you are working with. You can end the survey at this point, or join us for Act 2 as we drill down to HPC. We will publish the headline results in two or three weeks and push out a full report by the end of the year.

Thanks in advance to all our respondents.

Click here to start the survey. ®

Free whitepaper – Deploying high-density zones in a low-density data center