Forecasts of ARM-based On-premise HPC Servers

The application software landscape is quickly evolving along with HPC workloads. Independent software vendor (ISV) applications, as opposed to open-source or home-grown, have traditionally been considered the gold standard as the source for many HPC applications and were frequently cited as HPC users' top applications. While ISV revenues continue to rise, open-source application use is growing as well. Although HPC users can be reluctant to change the applications used at their site, developments such as the onset of AI, new types of hardware, and the cloud have spurred many users to explore new applications they may not have considered otherwise. Overall, the HPC application software landscape is rapidly developing in tandem with new HPC infrastructure and use cases.

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.