Key investment points
High performance computing is the most important thing in China: high performance computer (HPC, also known as supercomputer) is mainly used to solve challenging problems that can not be solved by other computers. It usually refers to a kind of computer with extremely fast computing speed, huge storage capacity and extremely high communication bandwidth. High performance computing is regarded as the “crown” of computer science and engineering. In recent years, countries have frequently launched development plans from the national level. After China has been listed in the global top 500 of high-performance computing for many times, the United States has included many Chinese institutions or enterprises related to high-performance computing in the list of entities since 2015, while the overall strength of China’s high-performance computing still lags far behind that of the United States. Therefore, the development of autonomous and controllable high-performance computing is very important.
High technical barriers to high-performance computing: the core capability of high-performance computing is 64 bit double precision floating-point computing capability, which is higher than the performance requirements of ordinary data centers and intelligent computing centers. Taking the realization of artificial intelligence requirements as an example, AI special chips can only complete reasoning and training tasks, while simulation tasks need higher performance accelerator chips. High performance computing is not a simple stack of CPUs. Architecture design, high-speed Internet, parallel file system, storage array and other software systems are also important. The technology spillover benefit of high-performance computing is very obvious. Because the server can smoothly adopt the interconnection technology, CPU technology, operating system technology and parallel software design of high-performance computing, the accumulation of high-performance computing can naturally overflow to the server industry.
China’s high-performance computing market is in a highly prosperous state: with the development of high-performance computing technology, especially the continuous decline of use costs, its application fields have also expanded rapidly from aircraft simulation, information security, oil exploration and other scientific computing fields with national strategic significance to the broader main battlefield of the national economy, such as pharmacy, gene sequencing, animation rendering, data mining Financial analysis and Internet services. The 14th five year plan and the new infrastructure drive the government’s investment in high-performance computing into a period of rapid growth. We expect that the single investment of large-scale high-performance computing centers will be more than 2 billion yuan. According to the average annual construction of five high-performance computing centers, the market scale of high-performance computing centers planned by the government will reach 10 billion yuan per year. In addition, companies in the Internet, finance, operators and other industries are also actively deploying high-performance computers. According to the prediction of guanyantianxia, the overall market scale of China’s high-performance computing industry will exceed 40 billion yuan in 2022, and the CAGR will be about 13% from 2021 to 2025.
The competition pattern of high-performance computing market is stable: according to the statistics of the number of main company systems in China’s top 100 high-performance computing, before 2002, the top 100 was mainly foreign HP and IBM, and later China’s Lenovo, dawn and wave. Among them, Dawning ranked first in the market share according to the number of installed units for 10 consecutive years from 2010 to 2019, accounting for nearly 40% in 2019. The tide began to improve significantly in 2014. Lenovo’s market share rose suddenly through the merger and acquisition of IBM’s x86 HPC product line in 2014. In 2021, Lenovo has achieved the first share in the number of top 100 installed units. Among Lenovo, Inspur and dawning, only dawning has domestic independent intellectual property rights from hardware such as chips to software systems.
Investment opportunities and recommended targets: with the continuous promotion of the 14th five year plan and new infrastructure, as well as the expansion of the field of high-performance computing application industry, and the strong demand for applications such as artificial intelligence, the high-performance computing market is expected to achieve rapid development. Recommended targets: Dawning Information Industry Co.Ltd(603019) , Digital China Group Co.Ltd(000034) , it is recommended to pay attention to Inspur Electronic Information Industry Co.Ltd(000977) , Lenovo Group.
Risk warning: industry competition intensifies; Policy promotion is less than expected; The epidemic risk exceeded expectations.
