A New View of the Total HPC Market: Adding Cloud’s Substantial Impact

The cloud market for HPC has undergone a fundamental shift in the past two years. Historically, user sites treated cloud resources primarily as additional to on-premises HPC systems to address peaks in workload demand. Generally, funds for HPC cloud resources were separate from the HPC system budgets and were not commonly critical components in future system procurement planning. Over the past two years, that paradigm has changed dramatically. Hyperion Research has conducted a number of studies that suggest cloud is becoming a major component in future resource planning for many HPC user sites. Many sites are now weighing cloud next to on-premises procurement strategies and altering the size and timing of future on-premises deployments to increase their budget for cloud resources.

Hyperion Research forecasts that the worldwide HPC server application workloads, representing the split-out of the HPC server market by application segments, will expand at a 7.8% CAGR to reach $19.9 billion in 2023, up from $13.7 billion in 2018 (see Figure 1). The categories in Figure 1 include high performance data analysis (HPDA) sub-segments: fraud and anomaly detection, affinity marketing, business intelligence, and precision medicine. Hyperion Research provides a separate detailed forecast on these sub-segments.