Summary of QC Cloud Access Offerings: Scoping the Wide Range of QC Providers, Technology Options, and Pricing Schemes

The US Government's Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) recently released a Federal strategic plan for a whole-of-nation approach to pioneering the future national advanced computing ecosystem that targets key application drivers and strategic objectives considered essential to US leadership, economic competitiveness, and national security. The plan specifically called out three critical application areas:

• • Extreme scale modeling and simulation
  • Data-intensive application workflows
  • End-to-end and real-time application workflows

The plan also arrays a number of key strategic objectives, including:

• • The development of an advanced ecosystem that spans government, academia, non-profits and industry
  • The support of foundational, applied and translational research
  • The expansion of a diverse, capable and flexible workforce

The strategic plan delineates US government agency roles and responsibilities and describes essential operational and coordination structures necessary to support and implement its objectives.

The HPC cloud market is continuing to rise as new users begin to adopt HPC cloud resources and existing users increase their spending and utilization of the cloud for HPC applications. Adoption and utilization of the cloud for HPC has varied based not only on the type of user but also on geography and the sizes of systems HPC users deploy on-premises.