2022 HPC End Users Perspectives on Use of Public/External Clouds for HPC Workloads, Trends, and Drivers

The high performance computing (HPC) sector is in the early stages of a major reinvention, fueled by a confluence of innovation in HPC hardware and system architectures, changing algorithms and application bases, and new access models.

HPC in the cloud has continued on a strong upward trajectory over the last few years, fueled by a concerted effort from CSPs to address the technical capabilities needed to better run HPC jobs in cloud environments. Many CSPs have bolstered their HPC strengths through hiring HPC experts to speak with HPC customers on application-specific issues, such as porting and running hard HPC jobs in the cloud. Further, CSPs are continuously increasing the platforms offered for HPC with the addition of offerings such as high performance processors, access to bare metal, a variety of accelerator options, high-performance interconnects, multiple storage offerings, as well as software packages valuable to HPC customers. These steps have resulted in dramatic advances in cloud adoption over the past two years, including a major growth year in 2019.