HPCWire: At its eighteenth meeting last week in Richmond, Virginia, the HPC User Forum welcomed a record 133 participants from the U.S., Europe and Japan, and treated them to examples of leadership computing and a technical discussion of HPC storage systems and data management.

The HPC community is invited to attend upcoming HPC User Forum meetings: May 29-30 in Bologna, Italy (hosted by CINECA); June 1-2 at ETH in Zurich; and September 18-20 in Denver, Colorado. The European meetings follow a different format and are free of charge. The meetings are co-sponsored by HPCwire.

IDC's Earl Joseph, who serves as executive director of the HPC User Forum, thanked the users for attending and providing 28 excellent end-user presentations, and the vendors who sponsored the meals, including HP, Intel, IBM, Linux Network, The Portland Group and Microsoft. He said the HPC purchasing power of the users at the meeting exceeded $1 billion. For the past three years, the HPC market has been the fastest-growing IT market IDC tracks, achieving 94 percent aggregate growth since 2002 and increasing 24 percent in 2005 alone to reach $9.2 billion in revenues. HP and IBM were virtually tied for first place, with Dell in third position. Clusters have been a disruptive force (71 percent growth in 2005) and now represent nearly half the market, while the capability- and enterprise-class segments continue their modest decline. The workgroup segment, for systems priced at $50,000 and under, has grown 200 percent since 2002.

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