Programming Languages Becoming More Ubiquitous: Most HPC Sites Use C/C++ and Python

The HPC User Forum was established in 1999 to promote the health of the global HPC industry and address issues of common concern to users. In May 2021, the 76th HPC User Forum took place virtually. This update summarizes a presentation from that virtual conference given by Sanzio Bassini, Director of SuperCalculation, Applications & Innovation Dept. at the CINECA consortium. He is currently a member of the EuroHPC Infrastructure Advisory Board and Leader of the EuroHPC Italian Pre-Exascale Infrastructure Leonardo Project. Bassini provided important updates on CINECA’s family of supercomputers, their evolving use cases and applications, as well as their plans to expand capabilities and continue empowering research scientists in Europe and around the world.

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.