2022 HPC End Users Perspectives on Trends and Forecast in HPC Storage and Interconnects – Key Findings

Since the dawn of the Supercomputer Era in the 1960s, a succession of base processors (CPUs) has attempted to satisfy HPC users' nearly insatiable demands for fast solution times on a wide spectrum of challenging problems, combined with affordability and energy efficiency. Chief among these entrants were vector processors, which ruled the HPC market through the 1990s, then RISC processors, and then x86-based processors, which began their steep ascendancy at that time and continue to dominate the market today, often in tandem with GPUs or other accelerators.

Storage and interconnects continue to be important elements of HPC system architecture and are expected to take on even greater significance with increasing demanding and diverse requirements driven by both traditional compute-intensive HPC mod/sim workloads and data-intensive AI workloads. The significance is reflected in recent market data and near-term forecasts, technology adoption and utilization trends, industry announcements in the second half of 2021, and future storage and related technology research direction of Hyperion Research.