Professional Services Make Up a Sizable Portion of Overall HPC Budgets

Slurm continues to be the most popular job queuing, resource manager, or scheduling software at HPC sites around the world. In a recent study, Slurm maintained its lead with half of all respondents (50.0%) reporting they use Slurm at least some of the time. After Slurm, the most popular resource managers and schedulers were OpenPBS (18.9%), PBS Pro (13.9%), Torque (13.3%), NQS (12.2%), and LSF (10.6%). 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.

Several years ago, anecdotal evidence led Hyperion Research to compile a list of applications that promised to be the most economically important HPC-enabled AI use cases. Rather than simply drawing attention as interesting one-off examples, these applications had emerged as repetitive AI workloads that vendors could begin to pursue as emerging market segments. Hyperion Research's recently completed multi-client study of the worldwide HPC market presented a direct opportunity to ask HPC user organizations whether they use or plan to use any of the economically important HPC-enabled AI applications.