ENGINEERING

Now that the IT industry is on a rebound, all companies hope to make the best of things and even believe they may strengthen their position if they manage to influence the direction taken by certain segments. NEC Corp., for instance, hopes to tighten its grip on the supercomputer segment, and intends to use the growing demand in Europe as a leverage. This, it hopes, will let it steal some market share from IBM, HP and other, smaller players.

Right now, NEC prefers to make supercomputers from its own microprocessors, but this means that customers have to develop special software, otherwise it won't work on NEC nodes. Unfortunately, for the company, the current trend seems to bend towards not just x86 supercomputers, but also installations equipped with GPU computing modules, such as AMD's FireStream and NVIDIA's Tesla series. All in all, NEC may not be able to grow in this area and stick to its own chips.

The supercomputer market is mostly owned by IBM and HP, whose combined share is 80%. Smaller players also seek to improve their share over the next few years, such as Fujitsu, which seeks to grow from 2.2% to 10% by 2015. It should also be noted that the worldwide HPC market is expected to expand 10% annually (will reach $14.6 billion). NEC hopes that, amids these conditions, it will be able to boost its own hold to 5% within four years. What remains to be seen is if NEC sticks to its own chips or switches to off-the-shelf x86 microprocessors.

“NEC will increase to 5% its share of the supercomputer market by 2014,” said Fumihiko Hisamitsu, general manager of NEC’s high-performance computing division, in an interview with BusinessWeek. “The barrier to entry in Europe is lower than in the U.S., where there’s a ‘buy American’ mentality. There’s a potential for us to grow our business there."