2021 Use of Public/External Clouds for HPC Workloads, Trends, and Drivers

The HPC market is experiencing many challenges and opportunities from the covid-19 virus and its resulting economic impacts. In July 2020, the situation appeared bleak, with a potential for 2020 HPC server revenues being down by as much as 20% year on year. More recently, surveys show an improved outlook, although still with a market contraction of approximately 14% compared with 2019. The Workgroup segment is bearing the near-term brunt of the downside impact.

Covid-related HPC investment impacts are not equally distributed across the vertical markets; several segments are already experiencing increased HPC investments. These include bio/life sciences and government labs. At the same time other verticals are facing a greater negative impact, including oil & gas, manufacturing, and DCC/content distribution

According to a recent Hyperion Research study of 115 current and interested QC end-users from both HPC and enterprise IT organizations, the majority would consider a wide range of quantum computing (QC) technology and use-case options spanning new QC and QC-inspired applications, as well as speed-ups of existing applications delivered through a mix of QC or hybrid QC/classical systems. Likewise, these same QC buyers/users reported relatively modest expectations for realized performance gains from QC technology: 78% of respondents would see a performance boost of less than 250X as justification for using QC, and 42% would only need 50X or below. Such expectations bode well for the quantum computing sector writ large as QC developers and suppliers can explore a broad array of quantum technologies in both hardware and software with some assurance that end-users will be open to a span of QC use-case options with relatively modest near-term performance gains.