A Thought Experiment on Accelerated HPC Cloud Growth

According to a recent Hyperion Research study of 115 current and interested QC end-users from both HPC and enterprise IT organizations, the average budget of surveyed QC buyers/users, worth about $3.2 million in 2019, will grow at a 27% CAGR between 2019 and 2024. This growth includes follow-on budget commitments from existing QC users as well as new budget commitments from a tranche of survey respondents who are currently only considering QC involvement. However, the number of organizations that are not yet certain of budget timetables over the next four years remains relatively constant at about 15% of those surveyed. A strong anticipated growth rate in QC end-user budgets implies high expectations for QC developments that can support adequate return on investment or sector-relevant competitive advantage. Current and potential QC users likely will be looking for QC suppliers to roll out a series of steady technological and use case advances that provide assurance that the QC sector is successfully moving to achieve stability, reducing the risk of being an early adopter.

AI and HPDA applications continue to grow in utilization and importance in the HPC space, altering the direction of system architecture and design as well as widening the scope of HPC and AI. HPC system architects now have to factor in a variety of processor technologies as well as interconnect, storage, and memory configurations to handle a more diverse set of workloads. Not only are HPC sites adopting emergent AI and HPDA workloads, but some are applying AI techniques to traditional modelling and simulation workloads to uncover new capabilities and solutions. This frequent pairing of simulation and analytics requires that HPC system designs be both compute and data friendly. As a result, recent designs are starting to reverse the emphasis on compute-centrism of past decades and establishing a better balance. Insights into the critical factors driving these and other trends are detailed in the 2021 iteration of Hyperion Research's annual Multi-Client Study (MCS) end users' report, AI and HPDA Usage and Future Technology Trends. Key findings from the report are summarized in this document.