Professional Services Make Up a Sizable Portion of Overall HPC Budgets

In a signed agreement published in December of 2022, the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) called for proposals to fund a €270M effort to develop a European HPC infrastructure built on the RISC-V open ecosystem. The effort also includes fostering an overall open-source RISC-V community, code porting capabilities, and the development of chiplets based on the RISC-V open instruction set architecture (ISA). RISC-V stands apart from other ISAs as an open-standard that is free to license and has no IP requirements. RISC-V currently has a few offerings in the base product but has clear potential in meeting flexibility and customizability needs over proprietary chip counterparts.

Expertise is now a major concern for both HPC and AI centers, outranked only by budget concerns. When asked about barriers to furthering AI capabilities, AI-specific expertise was a significant concern. Popular responses included access to AI expertise (49%), skills in AI model development (47%), and skills in AI programming (36%). This development comes at a time when a third of HPC sites (33%) report a lack of knowledge or skilled staff and identified this issue among their top three barriers to expanding on-premises HPC. This data is from the eighth annual study of Hyperion Research's high-performance computing (HPC) end-user-based tracking of the HPC marketplace. It included 181 HPC end-user sites with 3,830 HPC systems.