HPC Cloud Forecast 2020-2025

As AI and Big Data/HPDA applications continue to grow in importance and focus for HPC data centers and users worldwide, the demand for dedicated HPDA and AI systems are increasing at a rate nearly double that of the overall HPC market. By 2025, Hyperion Research expects roughly one-third of all system revenue to be dedicated to HPDA and AI-centric systems, in a category defined as Data[1]Centric HPC Systems. The portion of the data-centric market focused on AI applications is experiencing even higher growth, nearly 23% CAGR over the five year period, driven by the influx of AI workloads not only for new application spaces but also as a supplemental tool for the traditional simulations that have dominated the HPC space for decades. Some important HPDA workloads require analytics alone, while many benefit from combining established simulation and newer analytics methods, especially machine and deep learning.

Running HPC workloads in the cloud has undergone a fundamental shift over the past few years as CSPs have made a concerted effort to address the needs of HPC users, both for traditional HPC workloads as well as AI applications. Cloud adoption continues to rapidly increase for both current and new users, leading to a projection of end user HPC cloud spending to reach almost $9 billion by 2024. The spending for cloud resources by HPC end users primarily augments their spending for on-premise servers, as most users employ the cloud to complement, rather than replace, on-premise resources. There is much higher cloud adoption by workgroup users, suggesting that workgroup users are shifting some of their on-premise workloads to the cloud.