Covid-19 has impacted the worldwide HPC ecosystem in a variety of manners, leading to unpredictable changes in spending trends on systems, production, and installation of those systems, as well as changes in the sources of users' compute resources. Hyperion Research conducts surveys throughout the year to ask buyers for their expected short-term and long-term HPC spending changes in order to keep a tab on the ebbs and flows of the market. This Special Analysis explores changes in short-term budgets and expected spending. Due to the ever-changing situation of the world, these surveys have become critical in understanding, and predicting, the short-term spending trends of HPC buyers.

The US Government's Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) recently released a Federal strategic plan for a whole-of-nation approach to pioneering the future national advanced computing ecosystem that targets key application drivers and strategic objectives considered essential to US leadership, economic competitiveness, and national security. The plan specifically called out three critical application areas:

• • Extreme scale modeling and simulation
  • Data-intensive application workflows
  • End-to-end and real-time application workflows

The plan also arrays a number of key strategic objectives, including:

• • The development of an advanced ecosystem that spans government, academia, non-profits and industry
  • The support of foundational, applied and translational research
  • The expansion of a diverse, capable and flexible workforce

The strategic plan delineates US government agency roles and responsibilities and describes essential operational and coordination structures necessary to support and implement its objectives.