United States: AI Capabilities and Prospects

The HPC market is a dynamic environment from just about every perspective. Whether it be technology, business engagements and partnerships, or datacenter upgrade plans, there is rarely a dull moment. The first half of 2021 was no exception. This report provides HPC storage-related highlights and analysis of notable activity that occurred within the global HPC community over the past six months across several fronts including:

The purpose of this study was to gain a better understanding of the activities and use behaviors of AI users leveraging HPC-centric cloud resources. Key goals included creating a picture of user goals for AI integration, their current and planned methodologies, budget allocations, model lifecycle expectations, and preferred hardware and cloud platforms for their HPC-centric AI endeavors. This study also sought to gain a greater understanding of inferencing activities among organizations currently or planning to integrate AI into their workflow. Highlights from the study results include: •     Public cloud resources are considered a valuable asset in exploration and integration of AI into HPC or compute-intensive environments. •     Respondent organizations are leveraging a wide range of public cloud offerings. •     There are numerous architectures and device types currently used to meet inferencing needs. •     There is a plethora of desired qualities for the future of cloud computing expected by current and prospective AI users. •     Budgets among respondent organizations are expected to increase to meet training and inference needs, both in the cloud and on-premises.