HPC Market: Strong Growth For GPUs, HPC Cloud And AI Systems

It is based on high-performance computing(HPC) in the cloud, the rapid deployment of GPUs, mainframe sales like Japan’s “Fugaku” ($ 1 billion), and everything to do with AI. The risks are still the course of the pandemic and the problems in the IT supply chains. Computer systems cannot be powerful enough for research in industry and science. But high-performance computing, often together with AI, has long since found its way into enterprise IT.

Server sales accounted for around half ($ 14 billion) of the total market of $ 28 billion. By 2025, market researchers predict a market size of around $ 20 billion for servers only, which would correspond to annual growth of 7.9 per cent.

“We’re seeing some very big successes with several vendors,” said the CEO. “We continue to worry about the second half of the year because supply chains and other issues are struggling with Covid-19.”

Much in the HPC / AI market has remained the same compared to the previous year, so only the changes are mentioned. There are new sub-units for the supercomputing market: leadership systems of the scale class; Supercomputer-Large ($ 3 Million and Up); and entry-level supercomputers ($ 500,000 to $ 3 million). The bar for the supercomputer class is still half a million dollars.

These new categories make the development in the respective classes more transparent. “Large government agencies mainly buy the leadership systems”. But the current boom, as always in this cyclical market, will weaken by 2025. After 40 billion dollars in 2024, the overall market (servers, storage, Middleware, applications and service) will shrink to 39 billion dollars.

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Data-Centric IT With AI

The most dynamic market segment for servers is the data-centric area of application, especially for AI, data science and analytics. They process the swelling flood of data very quickly.

Within this segment, which is growing by around 12 per cent annually, the AI segment has an annual growth of almost 23 per cent, i.e. almost twice as much. HPC-supported AI servers make up around a third of the data-intensive servers today, “but this proportion should rise to almost half by 2025.” This segment grows three times as fast as the company at 23 percent of traditional data science servers.

Manufacturers’ Market Shares

Having bought SGI and Cray, HPE now owns about a third of the HPC server market. “Dell succeeds at around 21 percent and is growing relatively quickly. “Japan or the Japanese government is now in third place with 9.6 percent. We’re seeing a lot of changes in the list of market shares, and selling such a large system can change the whole rankings.”

The End-Users

Interviews between 100 and 1400 operators of HPC systems every twelve to 18 months. “Some have up to eight systems running,” says the current study. The average operating time for an HPC system has now risen to 4.2 years, after about 3.8 years the previous average. Attributes this to budget blockades and delayed purchase processes due to the pandemic.

More Accelerators In Use

“One of the surprises for our respondents in the study was the discovery that 83 per cent were already using some type of accelerator in their systems”. He speaks of GPUs, FPGAs, DPUs … you would use them for mainstream AI processing, traditional model simulations, or even just for experiments.

the different types of AI, machine learning and deep learning approaches used. “Machine learning is the most important and most common application of HPC.”

Deep learning shows growth but has also had to accept setbacks in terms of transparency and explain-ability. The importance of deep understanding to grow particularly rapidly in a long time. In addition to the mainstream of machine learning, there are other technologies, such as graph analytics, cognitive computer science (audio, video, language, etc.) and semantic analysis.

HPC In The Cloud

Analysts indicated that cloud resources for HPC workloads are increasing rapidly. “The HPC cloud market is expected to grow to $ 9 billion by 2025, an annual increase of 16.7 per cent.”

For comparison: the entire HPC market grows annually by almost eight per cent to nearly 40 billion dollars. The share of the HPC cloud market will increase from 14 to 19 per cent between 2020 and 2025, at the expense of the on-perm server.

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