Earl Joseph, an analyst at IDC, said much of the growth in the market is at the midrange and low end, with new buyers taking note. "Technical servers have become so inexpensive that you can buy a very powerful system for a small sum," said Joseph.

Moreover, HPC hardware is getting easier to use, and can help companies save money and time by alleviating the need for real tests and physical prototypes, he said. New areas of growth for HPC include basic engineering of parts, as well as large-scale online games and animation.

Crawford has been using desktop systems for some of the engineering work on Simpson Strong-Tie connectors, but computations sometimes took a week and weren't always completed. That led the company to try out an HPC system from Linux Networx Inc. The system uses 14 Opteron processors to run Abaqus Inc.'s engineering software.

The connectors made by Simpson Strong-Tie are of light-gauge steel and are used to join wood, as well as wood to concrete and masonry. Complex engineering is needed because "the strength of these joints is what essentially holds a building together," especially during a hurricane or earthquake, said Crawford. The integrity and safety of a building "is largely dependent on the little small connectors that they put in there to hold it together."

Creating realistic simulations can be computer intensive and time-consuming. But with HPC's ability to distribute jobs to individual nodes complex jobs can now be run overnight, said Frank Ding, research and design engineer at Simpson Strong-Tie.