Worldwide Defense High Performance Computing (HPC) Market Forecast 2015-2020

If one were to choose a metrics that represents the best national military capacity, the high performance computing power of a nation would win as the most comprehensive measure. More and more countries view supercomputing technology as a symbol of national military power.

High performance computing will be a key technology for meeting national security requirements and to enhance national defense and economic competitiveness. High performance computing contributes substantially to the design and development of advanced vehicles and weapons, planning and execution of operational military scenarios, the intelligence problems of cryptanalysis and image processing, the maintenance of nuclear stockpile, and is a key enabler for science and discovery in security-related fields.

“The United States cannot afford to take a back seat in computer technology to the Chinese, or to anyone else. The nation that leads the world in high-performance computing will have an enormous competitive advantage in every sector, including national defense…”, said Eric D. Isaacs, Director of Argonne National Laboratory.

The global defense high performance computing market is projected to reach $13.6 billion in 2020. The estimate for worldwide cumulative market 2015 – 2020 is $65.5 billion, for a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.4% over the period 2015-2020.

No modern war has been won without technological superiority. No future war will be won without it. The High Performance Computing (HPC) provides many capabilities and tools the military needs to address defense problems. HPC hardware and software can be used to address a wide spectrum of defense-related issues, including: protecting bases of operations through the mitigation of toxic threats; modeling to support certification of new aircraft-store combinations before deployment to conflicts zones; supporting air and space supremacy; conducting climate, weather, and ocean modeling that provides valuable information for countermine warfare; data mining and intelligence analysis, disaster modeling, preparation for emergency operations and humanitarian relief operations throughout the world. These are but a few examples.

The report provides detailed year-by-year (2015 – 2020) forecasts for the following defense HPC market segments:

• Infrastructure and service: 11 segments including servers, interconnects, HPC in the cloud and others;
• Applications: 10 segments;
• Fast growing/high priority technology segments, among them ARM-based servers, in-memory computing, and embedded High Performance Computing;
• By geographic region (Americas, EMEA, Asia/Pacific Rim) and by top 10 countries (country-by-country).

The report accounts for critical HPC applications in weapons technology, military communications, military simulation, operational weather and ocean forecasting; planning exercises related to analysis of the dispersion of airborne contaminants; cryptanalysis; military platform analysis; survivability/stealth design; intelligence/surveillance/reconnaissance systems; virtual manufacturing/failure analysis of large aircraft, ships, and structures; and biotechnology.

How much do individual countries plan to spend on defense-related HPC between 2015 and 2020? Where are the major market growth opportunities in military HPC market in 2015-2020? How are emerging COTS solutions shaping the market? These critical questions and many more can be answered through our in-depth research, as presented in this report.