A Growing and Changing HPC Applications Landscape

Key findings from a recent Hyperion Research study indicate that HPC storage solutions, and associated storage and system interconnects, continue to be critical for HPC infrastructure to deliver optimal capabilities and provide the fastest time to results for the systems' users. Data-intensive workloads driven by new AI/ML/DL workloads, increasing scale of traditional HPC modelling and simulation, emerging edge computing, and emerging composable systems are placing greater demands and requirements on HPC storage systems. Insights into the critical factors driving these and other trends are detailed in the 2022 iteration of Hyperion Research's annual MCS end users' study, 2022 HPC Multi-Client Study: Trends and Forecasts in HPC Storage and Interconnects. Key findings from the report are summarized in this document.

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.