Cloud Service Providers Poised to Expand AI Accelerator Options with Custom AI Chips

Hyperion Research has followed the growth of accelerators in HPC for more than 10 years. Accelerators had an initially slow HPC adoption curve but have recently experienced amplified growth. Within the HPC accelerator market, GPUs, particularly those from Nvidia, have dominated. Although originally designed as gaming processors for graphics rendering, GPUs were found to be well suited to a range of HPC applications, plus critical underlying AI functions, such as matrix multiplication, driving impressive performance gains. As a result, many HPC sites across a broad range of verticals are now using accelerators to speed up a larger portion of their increasingly AI-based workloads.

A recent survey revealed that HPC end users are looking to change the way they outfit their next HPCs, with many interested in exploring new types of processors, relying increasingly on GPUs and other accelerators to support computational gains, and preparing to increase their budgets to afford continued acquisition of more powerful HPCs. Insights into the critical factors driving these and other trends are detailed in the 2021 iteration of Hyperion Research's annual MCS end users' study, Processors, Coprocessors/Accelerators, and HPC budgets. Key Findings from the report are summarized in this document.