International Data Corporation (IDC) forecasts that the server market for High Performance Data Analysis (HPDA) will grow rapidly at 23.5% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) to reach $2.7 billion in 2018 and the related storage market will expand to about $1.6 billion in the same year.

HPDA is the term IDC coined to describe the formative market for big data workloads that exploit High Performance Computing (HPC) resources. The HPDA market represents the convergence of long-standing, data-intensive modeling and simulation (M&S) methods in the HPC market segments that IDC has tracked for more than 25 years and newer high-performance analytics methods that are increasingly employed in these segments as well as by commercial organizations that are adopting HPC for the first time.

"Leading commercial companies in a variety of market segments are turning to HPC technologies for challenging big data analytics workloads that enterprise IT technology alone cannot tackle effectively. HPC systems can handle more complex queries, more variables, and faster turnaround requirements," said Steve Conway, IDC Research Vice President for High Performance Computing/Data Analysis. "We estimate that the move to HPC has already saved PayPal more than $700 million and is saving tens of millions of dollars per year for other commercial companies, on top of the benefits reported by established HPC users in government, academia, and industry."

Chirag Dekate, Research Manager for High Performance Computing/Data Analysis, said, "IDC has closely tracked the HPDA market for more than five years and has created high-level forecasts before. The new in-depth forecasts are the first that track more than a dozen application and industry segments, including economically important new use cases for HPC: fraud and anomaly detection, business analytics/business intelligence, and marketing. The new forecasts are now available to clients of IDC's HPDA continuous information service."