2021 Verticals, Applications, Software, and Middleware Multi-Client Study Key Findings

Hyperion Research has followed the growth of accelerators in HPC for more than 10 years. Accelerators had an initially slow HPC adoption curve but have recently experienced amplified growth. Within the HPC accelerator market, GPUs, particularly those from Nvidia, have dominated. Although originally designed as gaming processors for graphics rendering, GPUs were found to be well suited to a range of HPC applications, plus critical underlying AI functions, such as matrix multiplication, driving impressive performance gains. As a result, many HPC sites across a broad range of verticals are now using accelerators to speed up a larger portion of their increasingly AI-based workloads.

In 2018, the European Union (EU) officially entered the competition for global leadership in artificial intelligence, outlining its strategy under the Coordinated Plan on Artificial Intelligence. Like China and the United States, the EU sees the technology as a major driver for regional economic growth and productivity, as well as a way to solve the world’s most pressing environmental and social challenges.