Barcelona Supercomputing Center

Two weeks ago, the US Department of Defense officially canceled its Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud solicitation and contract, ending a long period of uncertainty and controversy. Originally, the contract, which designated $10 billion to support cloud computing capabilities for a variety of workloads and departments across the DoD, had been awarded to a single vendor, Microsoft Azure, in 2019. However, after appeals from other vendors, the process was reevaluated. Ultimately Microsoft was awarded the contract a second time. After nearly two years into the JEDI solicitation and award process, the DoD stated that their needs had evolved, and the original contract no longer aligned with the requirements of the department. A new solicitation was issued, the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract, which indicated a plan to use multiple vendors to fulfill the needs of the contract. Currently, the DoD is seeking proposals from Microsoft and Amazon Web Services but will likely evaluate other qualified U.S. based CSPs.

Expertise is now a major concern for both HPC and AI centers, outranked only by budget concerns. When asked about barriers to furthering AI capabilities, AI-specific expertise was a significant concern. Popular responses included access to AI expertise (49%), skills in AI model development (47%), and skills in AI programming (36%). This development comes at a time when a third of HPC sites (33%) report a lack of knowledge or skilled staff and identified this issue among their top three barriers to expanding on-premises HPC. This data is from the eighth annual study of Hyperion Research's high-performance computing (HPC) end-user-based tracking of the HPC marketplace. It included 181 HPC end-user sites with 3,830 HPC systems.