Buyers’ Expected HPC Spending Changes: On-Premises and Cloud

The purpose of this study was to gain a better understanding of the activities and use behaviors of AI users leveraging HPC-centric cloud resources. Key goals included creating a picture of user goals for AI integration, their current and planned methodologies, budget allocations, model lifecycle expectations, and preferred hardware and cloud platforms for their HPC-centric AI endeavors. This study also sought to gain a greater understanding of inferencing activities among organizations currently or planning to integrate AI into their workflow. Highlights from the study results include: •     Public cloud resources are considered a valuable asset in exploration and integration of AI into HPC or compute-intensive environments. •     Respondent organizations are leveraging a wide range of public cloud offerings. •     There are numerous architectures and device types currently used to meet inferencing needs. •     There is a plethora of desired qualities for the future of cloud computing expected by current and prospective AI users. •     Budgets among respondent organizations are expected to increase to meet training and inference needs, both in the cloud and on-premises.

Expertise is now a major concern for both HPC and AI users, outranked only by budget concerns among top barriers to expanding HPC on-premises. A third of HPC sites (33.1%) reported that lack of knowledge or skilled support staff was one of their top three barriers. Only a third of respondents (35.4%) report that they do not have any staffing concerns within the next year. When asked about barriers to furthering AI capabilities, AI-specific expertise was identified as a significant concern. Other significant barriers also included access to AI expertise (48.9%), skills in AI model development (47.2%), and skills in AI programming (36.1%). This data is from an annual study that is part of the eighth edition of Hyperion Research's HPC end-user-based tracking of the HPC marketplace. It included 181 HPC end-user sites with 3,830 HPC systems.