A Broad International Roll Out of Exascale Systems on the Horizon

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.

A recent survey revealed that HPC end users are looking to change the way they outfit their next HPCs, with many interested in exploring new types of processors, relying increasingly on GPUs and other accelerators to support computational gains, and preparing to increase their budgets to afford continued acquisition of more powerful HPCs. Insights into the critical factors driving these and other trends are detailed in the 2021 iteration of Hyperion Research's annual MCS end users' study, Processors, Coprocessors/Accelerators, and HPC budgets. Key Findings from the report are summarized in this document.