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The first quarter of 2025 showed continued high growth, driven primarily by large AI system sales. 1Q2025 generated $6.7 billion US dollars in on-premises server sales, representing a 19.8% increase over the first quarter of 2024. The growth was focused on the higher end of the market with revenues for supercomputers that sold for $10 million to $150 million, growing by 52.2%, while server revenues that sold for under $10 million grew by 7.8%.

Japan's Fujitsu recently announced the development of a superconducting quantum computer (QC) targeted for 10,000 physical qubits and scheduled for competition in 2030. The system aims for 250 logical qubits implemented in Fujitsu's STAR architecture, an internal Fujitsu initiative that seeks to reduce qubit requirements for any given computation, potentially lowering the cost and complexity of building quantum computers. This effort is part of a Tokyo-funded initiative that centers on QC industrialization and is being run in conjunction with two leading Japanese HPC/QC research entities: Riken, Japan's largest comprehensive research institute, and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST).

Recently, generative AI security platform NeuralTrust reported a successful jailbreak of the advanced AI language model Grok 4, developed by Elon Musk's xAI. The breach was achieved using a dual-phase exploit strategy combining two powerful techniques: Echo Chamber and Crescendo. According to NeuralTrust's blog, the jailbreak was successful within two iterations of the combined attack, revealing a critical vulnerability in Grok 4's safety architecture. The breach occurred just two days after Grok 4's public release, raising serious concerns about the robustness of safety protocols in cutting-edge AI systems.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) are rapidly increasing the energy footprint of modern data centers. With projections suggesting that electricity demand from these facilities could more than double in the next several years, the search for sustainable, reliable, and scalable energy sources has become a priority for data center operators. Among the emerging technologies, small modular reactors (SMRs) are attracting significant attention. Unlike traditional large-scale nuclear plants, SMRs offer modular, compact, and consistent power generation, which may make them well-suited for the operational needs of AI-driven, high-density computing environments.

The EU Chips Joint Undertaking (JU), part of the European Chips Act to strengthen the European semiconductor sector, recently announced a consortium called SUPREME that aims to industrialize superconducting quantum chip fabrication over the next six years. A total of 23 partners from 8 Member States will participate in the effort coordinated by VTT, a prominent Finnish player in quantum technology. The consortium will draw on European activities in superconducting technology from academia, government research organizations, commercial quantum computing (QC) suppliers, and QC end users. Key players include IQM, a Finnish supplier of superconducting quantum systems, and Infineon, Europe's largest semiconductor manufacturer.

This report, the latest in the Hyperion Research HPC Profiles in Leadership series, spotlights the Jülich Supercomputing Centre (JSC), located at Forschungszentrum Jülich (FZJ), in Jülich, Germany. With origins dating back to 1956 as "Zentralinstitut für Angewandte Mathematik" (ZAM), FZJ has expanded well beyond its initial charter of nuclear energy and nuclear physics research to driving scientific research across a wide breadth of disciplines, including bioeconomy, alternative energy, neuroscience, and climate research. Operating as Germany's first national center for high-performance computing since 1987, it became JSC in 2007 with the goal of ensuring that scientists and researchers are able to conduct ground-breaking research and address society's most complex challenges.

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 April 2025, the 88th HPC User Forum took place in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This update summarizes a presentation from that conference given by Gianluca Longoni Ph.D., P.E., Executive Technical Director for AI and HPC at FedData Technology Solutions. Dr. Longoni discussed his exploratory benchmarking of the Intel Gaudi3 accelerator for inference applications. In his research, he assessed multiple success indicators and compared the Gaudi3 accelerator with its predecessors as well as other comparable hardware available on the market today.

As artificial intelligence (AI) workloads grow in size and complexity, and organizations seek to mature their utilization of AI, the need for robust governance, policy enforcement, security, and usability frameworks in the cloud are becoming increasingly sought after. Clouds can provide the necessary elasticity and scalability needed for modern computational science workloads, but cloud usage also introduces new governance challenges. Without proper governance and management structures in the cloud, some organizations risk overspending on elastic compute resources, exposing sensitive data across shared infrastructure, violating compliance requirements in multi-jurisdictional cloud environments, and overwhelming researchers with the complexity of cloud-native AI services and tools.

At the recent COMPUTEX 2025 exhibition, NVIDIA announced NVLink Fusion, its initiative to allow 3rd-party CPU and GPU providers to integrate directly into NVIDIA AI platforms. Included in the licensing package are the NVLink protocol and physical transport. As part of the announcement, MediaTek, Marvell, Alchip Technologies, Astera Labs, Synopsys, and Cadence were identified as partners to support development and provide custom AI devices for integration into the NVLink ecosystem. Also announced were plans from Fujitsu and Qualcomm to build custom CPUs that can be integrated with NVIDIA GPUs to build AI platforms and provide choices for users creating AI factories.

The Open Compute Project (OCP) recently released a draft version of the Mt. Diablo disaggregated power rack specification. With contributions from Google, Meta, and Microsoft, the specification aims to provide IT racks the ability to support up to 1 megawatt (MW) of load per rack via a disaggregated power architecture.

Connecting the Dots was the theme for ISC25 and with the vast array of dots on the conference canvas, there seems to be multiple pictures emerging. The impact of scientific discovery and innovation enabled by the global HPC and AI community has never been more evident while the ramifications of US policy and funding decisions are impacting support for key initiatives in several scientific areas muted the future outlook of possible outcomes. Primary takeaways complied by Hyperion Research analysts attending the event include: The TOP500 list continues to highlight the slowing progress of HPC performance and the difficulty with, or perhaps the ambivalence for, fielding a top 10 system. Event scheduling conflicts (ISC25, NVIDIA GTC-Paris, AMD Advancing AI) diluted participation of both vendors and attendees. AI Factories were pervasive with different areas of focus across different global regions. The jury is still out on AI's ultimate contribution to traditional HPC workloads.

Supermicro Computer, Inc. joins others in a realignment of data center server options with a recently expanded portfolio of single-socket servers. This portfolio features over 20 systems designed to boost data center performance, delivering significant improvements in power, space, and cost efficiency, while doubling the core count compared with previous generations. These servers leverage advanced Intel Xeon 6 processors with P-Cores, which are designed to support a wide range of applications, including high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI). Similar offerings have emerged in recent years from Dell's PowerEdge, HPE's ProLiant, and Lenovo's ThinkSystem lines, reflecting a market-wide shift toward optimizing data center performance within increasingly strict power, cooling, and cost constraints.

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 April 2054, the 88th HPC User Forum took place in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This update summarizes a presentation from that conference given by Ann Speed, a PhD cognitive psychologist and long-time researcher at Sandia National Laboratories. Her research focuses on increasing analyst efficacy primarily in the visual search domain through human subject experimentation as well as exploring the relationship between laboratory-based research and observations in operational and near-operational environments. This discussion focuses on research conducted on the behavioral patterns of large language models like GPT through the lens of human psychological and cognitive assessment.

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 April 2054, the 88th HPC User Forum took place in Santa Fe, New Mexico. This update summarizes a presentation from that conference given by Terri Quinn, Deputy Associate Director of HPC Computing at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). Quinn presented on the status of El Capitan, LLNL's exascale supercomputer for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), including deployment challenges, current operations, and how this system is informing LLNL's future computing strategy.

Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), in collaboration with US GPU supplier NVIDIA, has a stood up a classical HPC platform called the ABCI-Q system that supports research focused on hybrid quantum-classical computing. The system is hosted at AIST's Global Research and Development Center for Business by Quantum-AI Technology (G-QuAT), a recently formed entity tasked with advancing research in quantum technology, creating new global markets utilizing quantum computing (QC) technology and generating economic value through industry collaboration.

Industry publications often focus on GPU hardware's raw performance potential. While competitive performance is essential in assessing GPUs' capabilities for high-performance and AI computing, software capabilities are equally important. This article explores software capabilities for GPUs from three major GPU software providers: NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel.

The 88th HPC-AI User Forum (UF) was recently held from April 8-9, 2025, in Sante Fe, New Mexico. With a mission of promoting the health of the global HPC industry and address issues of common concern to users, the UF brings together global HPC-AI leaders from government, academia, and industry to share best practices and lessons learned from across the entire HPC-AI ecosystem. HPC-AI in the cloud, inclusive of hyperscalers, full-service cloud service providers (CSP), and GPU/AI as a service (aaS), was one ecosystem area discussed at the 88th UF. Various perspectives were shared from the following individuals and organizations: Mark Nossokoff (Research Director, Hyperion Research): A Random Walk in the Clouds Sam Skillman (Staff Software Engineer, Google Cloud Platform): Progress in Developing HPC/AI Infrastructure Chris Maestas (CTO, Data and AI Storage Solutions, IBM): IBM Storage Scale for HPC and AI Solutions in the Cloud

A recent Hyperion Research study of 82 quantum computing (QC) suppliers from North America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific, conducted at the behest of the US-based Quantum Economic Development Consortium, revealed that partnerships have become an important activity across the QC supplier sector. The study found that 83% of the QC companies surveyed had partnerships with other QC supplier(s), 74% had partnerships with at least one government research organization, and 71% had partnerships with at least one QC end user. Motivations for such partnerships varied widely and most were initiated to address more than one key objective.

USA-based MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) recently unveiled a new programming language for high-performance computing (HPC) called Exo 2. This language allows HPC programmers to explicitly control how the compiler generates code by creating scheduling operations outside the compiler. This approach may foster faster user-directed code execution while facilitating the creation of reusable scheduling libraries. MIT claims this approach may boost flexibility and promote the reuse of scheduling code across different applications and hardware platforms.

Listing of select Hyperion Research Recent Reports spanning February 2024 to March 2025

Publicly available version of the global quantum computing and quantum sensor market studies sponsored by the US-based QED-C.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads continue to drive higher power densities in data centers, and liquid cooling is becoming increasingly important for maintaining performance and preventing thermal throttling. These data center cooling requirements have reached a critical juncture, particularly for existing facilities, commonly referred to as brownfield facilities. As scientists and researchers increasingly integrate AI into their research and operational workloads, data centers will seek to adapt their cooling infrastructure to remain relevant. However, brownfield sites face unique challenges in implementing liquid cooling solutions due to architectural and infrastructure limitations.

Researchers at the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC), recently published a paper that outlined their efforts to execute a random circuit sampling (RCS) test on their 105 qubit Zuchongzhi 3.0 quantum processor unit (QPU). The paper, appearing in the APS Physical Review Letters, reported that the QPU achieved 106 samples in just a few hundred seconds, a task cited as infeasible on the most powerful classical supercomputers today and that USTC researchers claimed would require the US DOE's Frontier HPC approximately 5.9×109  years to replicate. This follows a similar Google announcement made late last year that their 105 qubit Willow QPU performed a similar RCS test in under five minutes, which Google researchers said would have taken one of the fastest supercomputers 1025 years, a number that greatly exceeds the age of the universe.

The purpose of this study was to gain a better understanding of the activities and use behaviors of AI users actively engaging in inference processing. Key objectives included creating a picture of user goals for AI inference integration, their current and planned methodologies, budget allocations, expectations, and preferred hardware, software, and cloud resources for their HPC-centric inference endeavors.

The European Technology Platform for High Performance Computing (ETP4HPC) recently published the 6th edition of its Strategic Research Agenda (SRA 6). Published every two years, SRAs provide a snapshot of recent HPC-AI technology developments. New research domains and thematic trends include AI and foundational models, quantum and HPC, energy efficiency and sustainability, and ecosystem technologies. Perspectives on post-exascale and hardware programs focused on European sovereignty are also provided.

Recently, young chip startup AheadComputing reported raising $21.5M in seed funding for their RISC-V-based CPU solutions. The group, founded by several former Intel CPU engineers and executives, acquired funding led by Eclipse Ventures as well as former Apple and Tesla chip architect Jim Keller. AheadComputing is working to develop innovative solutions to the CPU power and efficiency issues of AI-centered hardware. According to AheadComputing CEO Debbie Marr, the RISC-V ISA, of which several of AheadComputing's founding members have considerable experience, brings multiple advantages to the endeavor. RISC-V, as Marr posits, has "plenty of room for innovation" as its open, unowned ecosystem can allow for a greater breadth of contributory knowledge and design opportunities.

CoreWeave has announced the general availability of NVIDIA GB200 NVL72-based instances, marking a significant milestone in the cloud computing landscape, particularly for AI and high-performance computing (HPC). CoreWeave claims to be the first cloud provider to offer these advanced instances, which are designed to enhance the training, deployment, and scaling of complex AI models.

The Wenchang Aerospace Supercomputing Center, located in Wenchang, Hainan Province, China, stands as a flagship project at the intersection of aerospace and advanced computing. Breaking ground in 2018 and completed in August 2023, this state-of-the-art facility marks a significant milestone in China's technological landscape, serving as the country's only supercomputing center dedicated exclusively to aerospace research.

For 2025 and beyond, Hyperion Research makes these predictions for the worldwide HPC-AI market: 1. There will be a resurgence of the human element in adopting and integrating AI. 2. As AI gains traction among industry leaders, new use cases, optimization, regulatory developments, and ROI will become a focus for users. 3. The rapid rise of compute requirements for large language model training runs will begin to slow, with a shift in emphasis on more efficient models using more fine-tuned, focused, and smaller training data sets. 4. HPC end users, particularly those with major investments in legacy codes built on 64-bit floating-point data formats, will begin to explore in earnest the increasing performance capabilities of mixed and low precision hardware. And six more.

Riken, Japan's largest comprehensive research institution, recently announced the successful on-premises installation of a 20 qubit quantum computer (QC) from US-based Quantinuum, targeted to enhance Riken's ability to explore research possibilities of QC/HPC hybrid platforms. The QC system is named Reimei, which translates into "dawn" in Japanese. The name, Riken officials say, symbolizes the potential of both quantum technology and integrated hybrid computational platforms. The Reimei is installed at Riken's Wako campus and will be linked to Riken's Fugaku HPC in Kobe. In 2020, the Fugaku system premiered at the leading spot on the Top 500 list, a twice annual listing of the world's most powerful HPCs, and it is currently ranked at number six. For its part, the Reimei is a Quantinuum H1-1 ion trap QC that contains 20 fully connected qubits.

Hyperion Research has just completed a study of AI inferencing practices, trends, and concerns. Data from this study of HPC users integrating AI inferencing technology into their HPC workloads indicated major concerns in the areas of cost management, complexity of integration, and potential technical issues. As shown in previous Hyperion Research studies, the majority of HPC sites, especially in the industrial and commercial sectors, are in various stages of integrating AI technology into their HPC/technical computing workflows. While buy-in on the promises of the technology remain high, there are some major potential roadblocks, especially when it comes to budgeting, ease of use, and the complex realm of hardware and software management.

Blackstone Tactical Opportunities recently announced a $300M investment in DDN, valuing DDN at $5B. Blackstone's investment strengthens the portfolio supporting its AI digital infrastructure investment theme, while DDN aims to use the financial support to accelerate its efforts to bring enterprise-grade AI to a wide breadth of organizations.

Formed in September of 2024, the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (JU) NET4EXA research and innovation project, funded for €71 million through 2027, aims to develop and deploy innovative interconnect technologies for exascale and post-exascale infrastructures. The project is coordinated by the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), with participants including two vendors, Eviden and Numascale, as well as academic and government user sites and will build upon two previous generations of the Eviden BullSequana eXascale Interconnect (BXI). Goals of the project include: Deliver greater efficiency, capacity, and adaptability for future supercomputing requirements Deploy a BXIv3-based pilot system for integration into exascale and post-exascale infrastructures Address high-bandwidth, low-latency communication, and efficient CPU/GPU integration challenges Identify a roadmap to BXIv4 to further enhance system performance and energy usage for AI and HPC

Microsoft continues to expand its presence in the quantum computing (QC) community with a recent announcement of a growing partnership with neutral atom QC supplier Atom Computing. Public statements by Atom Computing officials reveal that sometime this year the two companies will begin offering an Atom Computing system, likely its 1000-plus physical qubit array supporting up to 50 error-corrected logical qubits, to be owned and installed at customer facilities. Atom Computing officials indicated that the company is focused on on-premises deployments as a way to support in-house QC ecosystem and workforce development. For its part, Microsoft will supply its Azure Quantum stack, qubit virtualization system, and cloud HPC and AI integration tools. This is the first such foray by Microsoft into the direct on-premises QC market.

Google and Amazon announced major initiatives in mid-October to incorporate Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) into their clean energy strategies. Google partnered with Kairos Power to explore their fluoride salt-cooled, high-temperature reactor technology, while Amazon formed agreements with Energy Northwest to develop four advanced SMRs in Washington state and is exploring an additional project with Dominion Energy near Virginia's North Anna nuclear station. These initiatives aim to power their data centers while advancing their sustainability commitments.

With approximately 18,000 attendees and over 500 exhibitors, including more than 130 new exhibitors, SC24 in Atlanta surpassed organizer expectations and delivered a vibrant and energetic environment for the global HPC community to exchange ideas while establishing or extending collaborative partnerships and relationships. As is our custom, the Hyperion Research team of analysts has compiled its primary takeaways and perspectives from more than 80 customer meetings, workshop and session attendance, and a myriad of other interactions at the event.

At its recent re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, AWS announced its AWS FSx for Lustre service now supports its Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) high performance network interface and NVIDIA's GPUDirect Storage (GDS). These new capabilities aim to reduce overall workload costs and substantially improve workload completion times by reducing inter-node latency for distributed training, more efficiently scaling across multiple GPUs, and eliminating CPU bottlenecks by creating a direct path between GPU and storage and reducing memory copying operations.

In support of its 50th anniversary celebration, NERSC commissioned Hyperion Research to measure and convey the impact, value, and scientific return on research (RoR) conducted at NERSC's leadership supercomputing facility. The study built upon Hyperion Research's existing framework for assessing scientific RoR conducted at global leadership computing sites and tailored it to NERSC's mission. The results of the study place the value and impact of the work accomplished at NERSC among the best in the world.

The EuroHPC JU recently issued an award for its first industrial grade supercomputer, resulting from a call it issued in February 2024. With an eye towards meeting the security, confidentiality and data integrity needs of European industrial users, the award was issued to the Innovate consortium, led by CINECA and includes seven Italian industrial partners from a broad range of sectors. The JU will provide up to 35% of the acquisition costs, with the balance provided by consortia members.

The growing utilization of high performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI) has ushered in unprecedented demands for data storage and processing, making data centers a critical infrastructure in our modern world. However, these facilities' substantial energy requirements have become a pressing concern for both environmental sustainability and operational costs. Data center energy requirements are becoming an increasingly prominent topic in the worldwide power usage conversation. For example, the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that data centers consumed between 240 and 340 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity in 2022, accounting for about 1-1.3% of global demand, with expectations of this consumption potentially doubling by 2026.

In an announcement made in late November, 2024, recent US-based start-up Kinesis Network announced the launch of their serverless feature targeted to enable users to fluidly run workloads in a multi-cloud environment. By leveraging underutilized GPU capacity in cloud environments, Kinesis hopes to help organizations reduce infrastructure costs by up to 90% while providing access to high-performance GPUs for AI and data-intensive tasks. Founded by industry veterans from AWS, IBM, and Microsoft, Kinesis is gaining attention as AI and HPC/AI integrated organizations grapple with the high costs of cloud computing, increased demands for advanced computing power, and a continuing need for flexible, scalable access to processing capability.

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 September 2024, the 85th HPC User Forum took place at Argonne National Laboratory. This update summarizes a presentation from that conference given by Rao Kotamarthi, Senior Scientist in the Environmental Science division at Argonne National Laboratory, where he also serves as a Chief Scientist. Additionally, he is the Science Director at the Center for Climate Resilience and Decision Science (CCRDS). Kotamarthi discussed ongoing activities in climate research leveraging AI/ML techniques as well as the plans and challenges relating to the research.

US-based large language model (LLM) developer Anthropic and major cloud service provider (CSP) Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently announced that they were deepening their existing collaboration to support both firms' competitive prospects in the rapidly growing and increasingly competitive generative AI sector. Anthropic named AWS as its primary LLM training partner and will work with AWS to further develop AWS's AI-centric Trainum and Inferentia chips. Plans also call for Anthropic to use the AWS chips to train and deploy its future foundation models. In addition, AWS will invest $4 billion in Anthropic, adding to its earlier $4 billion investment last year, although AWS will remain a minority investor in Anthropic.

On October 21 and 22, 2024 the 86th HPC User Forum was held at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. At the Forum BSC presented updates on its facilities, quantum computing, and major research areas. First published in 2017 and revised again in 2023, this newest revision to the HPC Profile in Leadership of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS) provides the most recent insights regarding BSC. The Barcelona Supercomputing Center-Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) has long been recognized as one of the leading scientific research and computational science centers in Europe, if not the world. Realizing its mission to "…research, implement, manage, and transfer technology and knowledge in the area of HPC with the aim of facilitating progress in a variety of scientific fields…", BSC-CNS has made significant research and scientific contributions to its primary focus areas of computer, life, earth, and engineering sciences.

In September 2024, the 85th HPC User Forum took place at Argonne National Laboratory. This update summarizes a presentation from that conference given by Rick Stevens, Associate Laboratory Director and Argonne Distinguished Fellow. He is Argonne's Associate Laboratory Director for the Computing, Environment, and Life Sciences (CELS) Directorate and a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago as well as playing other roles in national and academic advanced computing development. Stevens held multiple discussions at the 85th HPC User Forum, one of which was an overview of the Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence for Science, Security, and Technology (FASST) Initiative.

The US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory will head up a new $23 million research program called New Frontiers that seeks to establish government/industry partnerships to advance HPC performance and efficiency. The initiative will support new and/or accelerated R&D of technologies targeted for production within the next five to ten years and is open to hardware, software, and cross-cutting technologies including: Energy efficiency for the next generation of exascale computing Open-source and sustainable software technologies for extreme scale HPC systems Development of techniques necessary to support emerging workloads of DOE facilities

Intel and AMD recently announced the formation of an x86 ecosystem advisory group aimed at improving performance and compatibility across platforms. The group includes members from industry-leading vendors including Dell, HPE, Lenovo, Oracle, Google Cloud, Microsoft, Broadcom, Oracle, and Red Hat as well as individuals such as Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux operating system. Goals include expanding the x86 ecosystem, simplifying architectural guidelines, improving consistency across platforms, and improving integration of cutting-edge features into existing x86-based workstreams.

The rapid emergence of AI and its unique and often demanding computational requirements are having a significant impact on the overall design and development trajectory of advanced HPC component accelerators. Prior to the rise of AI starting in 2019, such accelerators, particularly graphic processing units or GPUs, were largely seen as a complementary, specialized compute resource to facilitate offloading from the system's central processing unit (CPU) a narrow set of computationally-intensive operations integral to science and engineering workloads. With the emergence of AI, however, the role of accelerators, particularly GPUs at this time, have become more central, requiring significant changes in their design and in many cases becoming the defining compute engine for an increasingly large number of HPCs.

The U.S. is entering a period of rapid electricity demand growth, driven by power consumptive technologies such as AI, coupled with data center expansion and economic development, including new domestic manufacturing. Electricity demand is expected to grow 15-20% in the next decade and double by 2050. The DOE Office of Policy recently released the blog post - Clean Energy Resources to Meet Data Center Electricity Demand, highlighting DOE resources designed to assist data center developers in meeting electricity demands through clean energy solutions. DOE resources available to data centers include loans, grants, FOAs, tax credits, and technical assistance.

The purpose of this study was to gain a better understanding of the activities and use behaviors of AI users leveraging HPC-centric cloud resources. Key goals included creating a picture of user goals for AI integration, their current and planned methodologies, budget allocations, model lifecycle expectations, and preferred hardware and cloud platforms for their HPC-centric AI endeavors. This study also sought to gain a greater understanding of inferencing activities among organizations currently or planning to integrate AI into their workflow. Highlights from the study results include: •     Public cloud resources are considered a valuable asset in exploration and integration of AI into HPC or compute-intensive environments. •     Respondent organizations are leveraging a wide range of public cloud offerings. •     There are numerous architectures and device types currently used to meet inferencing needs. •     There is a plethora of desired qualities for the future of cloud computing expected by current and prospective AI users. •     Budgets among respondent organizations are expected to increase to meet training and inference needs, both in the cloud and on-premises.

The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (JU) recently initiated two calls seeking interest from hosting sites to house AI Factories. These calls stem from the July 2024 appended JU regulation to expand the JU's AI objectives. Funding includes up to €400M for new or upgraded AI EuroHPC supercomputers and up to €180M for the establishment and operation of the AI Factories as well as the development and deployment of advanced experimental AI-optimized supercomputing platforms. The EU funds will be matched with an equal amount of budget by participating JU countries. The AI Factories are intended to bring together key elements required for AI success (computing power, data, and talent) and make the resources available to a broad range of European users, including start-ups, industry, and researchers.

A recently released US government report prepared by the US National Science and Technology Council, a cabinet-level council of advisors to the US President, presented a compelling argument for robust international cooperation in quantum information science and technology (QIST). The group called for dedicated funding mechanisms and improved US government interagency coordination to bolster global QIST collaboration. Key motivations cited for standing up a centralized US government cooperative QIST program included opportunities to advance QIST capability at a faster pace, to grow, attract, and engage international talent, to promote robust access to necessary QIST resources and their eventual markets, and to strengthen international engagement with nations considered to be aligned with US economic and national security interests. The report recognized that US government departments operate under an autonomous funding model with individual agencies having their own programmatic mechanisms, complicating the options for those agencies to participate in large-scale, multinational cooperative partnerships either individually or collectively.

With the recent political transition in the UK, national investment priorities to stimulate the economy appear to have shifted. The new leadership, through the Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology (DSIT), recently rescinded a commitment made by the prior government to spend £1.3 billion towards advancing AI-based research, including £800 million to develop an exascale supercomputer at the Edinburgh Parallel Computer Center (EPCC) and £500 million to extend and expand the AI Research Resource (AIRR) to support computing power for AI research. This decision does not impact £300 million already distributed for the AIRR, nor DSIT's funding for its AI Opportunities Action Plan.

The University of California Board of Regents recently approved the creation of a new school at UC San Diego aimed to provide students opportunities to engage directly with industry and government partners, and learn first-hand how data science can allow organizations to better address a broad range of societal problems such as climate change mitigation, social justice issues, technical challenges, and healthcare. The School of Computing, Information and Data Sciences (SCIDS) intends to combine the strengths of the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) and the Halicioğlu Data Science Institute (HDSI) to create a curriculum to advance data science and AI state-of-the-art.

For years, the AI cloud accelerator market has been dominated by just a few powerful GPU offerings, enabling the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence and machine learning. However, the growing demand for efficient and specialized hardware to power complex AI workloads has led to the rise of a trend: the development of custom AI chips by cloud service providers (CSPs). CSPs, such as AWS, Google, Microsoft, and Alibaba. They have recognized the need for more tailored hardware solutions to address the unique requirements of their cloud-based AI services and customers. By developing their custom AI chips, these CSPs aim to diversify their accelerator offerings to users, optimize the hardware-software stack for their cloud environments, and gain a competitive edge in the rapidly evolving AI cloud ecosystem.

In a soon to be available Hyperion Research study focusing on HPC users leveraging cloud resources for AI tools and capabilities, respondents most often indicated that they are currently engaged in exploratory and experimental stages of AI adoption, even those who have already integrated AI capabilities and technologies into some portion of their production environments. In this study, respondents demonstrated a preference for cloud over on-premises options for a range of AI-centric activities.

US-based quantum computer (QC) maker, Infleqtion, announced that it will provide the first of seven prototype deployments made under the UK National Quantum Computing Centre's (NQCC) £30 m (US$38.9 million) program designed to establish QC testbeds based on different hardware technologies by March 2025. All of the system-level prototypes will be built by the quantum hardware companies at the NQCC facilities on the Harwell Campus in Oxfordshire. The stated goal of the testbed program is to support the NQCC's mission of accelerating the development of quantum computing capabilities and related infrastructure within the UK. The six other QC makers participating in the program, who likely will be announcing their deployments shortly, are Aegiq, ORCA Computing, Oxford Ionics, Quantum Motion, QuEra Computing, and Rigetti, a mix of US, EU, and Israeli-based QC suppliers.

At their annual HPE Discover conference, HPE introduced the HPE Private Cloud AI family of turnkey solutions as part of its NVIDIA AI Computing by HPE portfolio. The HPE Private Cloud AI solutions integrate NVIDIA AI computing, networking, and software with HPE's AI storage and HPE Greenlake Cloud, with complete on-premises solutions fully tested with all the software preloaded. Beyond the infrastructure elements HPE is bringing to this partnership, they are also contributing business leadership in areas such as sales teams and channel partners, training, and a global network of system integrators to the joint go-to-market (GTM) efforts that aim to help enterprises expedite time-to-value from their investments in AI inferencing.

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 April 2024, the 84th HPC User Forum took place in Reston, Virginia. This update summarizes a presentation from that conference given by John Speakman, Assistant Vice President for Research and Education Information Technology at NYU Langone. He leads the provision of information and technology for the academic (scientific and educational) missions of NYU Langone Health, advancing the vision of the institute's digital transformation. His discussion at the April 2024 meeting covered the HPC resources built and leveraged at the university and healthcare system as well as details about their newly integrated AI tools.

With a theme of Reinventing HPC, ISC24 provided a venue for the global HPC community to come together and share knowledge and experiences relative to the latest market developments and technology innovations for the evolution of advanced technical computing. That said, it was clear that this was the year that AI took over the conference and was the key topic of discussion. Issues at the forefront centered on new hardware and software to support the rapidly expanding demand for AI training and inference, the promise and concerns with AI 's abilities to accelerate scientific and engineering workloads, apprehensions with the relative slowdown in performance progress made in the traditional HPC space, the growing presence and influence of cloud-based capabilities and their associated providers, especially in the areas of AI, and the issues, if not angst, of new AI processor availability, performance, and cost. Indeed, the approximately 3,200 attendees reflected a wide array of sentiment towards the convergence and adoption of AI within the worldwide scientific and research community, ranging from examples of compelling use cases and success stories to lessons learned from associated challenges, to "… AI will soon be inflicted upon us … ."

Two leading government-funded Japanese research facilities recently announced plans to procure two on-premise quantum computing (QC) systems, both from US suppliers, to support the exploration of new capabilities in QC as well as hybrid quantum/classical capabilities. QuEra Computing announced it has been awarded a 6.5 billion JPY contract (approx. $41M USD) by Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology to deliver one of its gate-based neutral-atom quantum computers in 2025. IBM announced an agreement with Riken, a Japanese national research laboratory that is home to Fugaku, one of the fastest classical HPC in the world, to procure an IBM System 2, powered by one of IBM's most advanced superconducting quantum processors, the 133-qubit Heron.

This Hyperion Research study presents the latest five-year forecast (2023-2028) for HPC on-premises technical servers. Worldwide revenue for the HPC technical server market in 2023 was $15.0 billion, representing a slight decline (-2.7%) over 2022 revenues. Hyperion Research now predicts that the HPC technical server market will grow at an 8.2% CAGR between 2023 and 2028 to reach $22.2 billion in 2028 (see Figure 1). Compared with the previous version of the forecast, there have been some downgrades to the revenues for 2023 through 2027, primarily due to rescheduling of some large exascale systems and ongoing supply chain delays.

In April 2024, the 84th HPC User Forum took place in Reston, Virginia. This update summarizes a presentation from that conference given by Stephen Ezell, Vice President for Global Innovation Policy at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) and Director of ITIF's Center for Life Sciences Innovation. He also leads the Global Trade and Innovation Policy Alliance. Ezell's discussion at the April 2024 meeting covered an update on the CHIPS and Science Program as well as some issues surrounding the funding and development of the program's goals.

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 April 2024, the 84th HPC User Forum took place in Reston, Virginia. This update summarizes a presentation from that conference given by Buddy Rizer, Executive Director for economic development in Loudoun County, Virginia. He leads the agency responsible for encouraging growth and developing relationships with local business communities in both commerce and agriculture. His discussion at the April 2024 meeting covered the economic and growth strategies of Loudoun County, VA and their economic partners, as well as some of the holistic advantages of the area which ultimately led to the term "Data Center Alley."

US-based quantum computer (QC) supplier, PsiQuantum announced this week that it has entered into an agreement with the Australian Commonwealth and Queensland Government to build what they are calling the world's first utility-scale quantum computer, to be located at a new site in Brisbane, Australia. Funding consists of a mixed financial package of equity, grants, and loans totaling $940M AUD ($620M USD). The project schedule calls for the site to be operational by the end of 2027, with successive generations of PsiQuantum QC systems to follow.

The American Meteorological Society (AMS) recently hosted its 104th Annual Meeting in Baltimore, Maryland with the theme of "Living in a Changing Environment". The event consisted of 47 meetings and symposia on various topics involving the science, policy, and technology of climate change, oceanography, and meteorology. Among these was the 10th Annual Symposium on High Performance Computing (HPC) for Weather, Water, and Climate. HPC is considered essential to the efforts of weather, water, and climate organizations worldwide to provide accurate forecasts and advance scientific understanding of Earth's systems. A panel discussion including David Michaud (NWS), Laurie Carriere (NASA), Thomas Hauser (NCAR), Frank Indiviglio (NOAA), and Tiago Quintino (ECMWF) shed light on the shared challenges and opportunities faced by these organizations in leveraging HPC for weather prediction and climate modeling.

Established in November 2023, the DAOS Foundation was formed under the auspices of the Linux Foundation to advance the governance and development of the Distributed Asynchronous Object Storage (DAOS) project. The broad range of founding members includes Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), Enakta Labs, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and Intel. Accordingly, the DAOS Foundation aims to accelerate next-generation technical computing for a broad range of workloads, including both traditional HPC modeling and simulation (mod/sim) as well as modern Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML).

The EuroHPC JU recently issued a call seeking interest in identifying a consortia of private partners and hosting entities for the procurement of industrial high performance computers. The selection of a hosting site and identification of private partners is a precursor to subsequently implementing the procurement and operation of the machine, which may be an independent system or a partition of one of the EuroHPC supercomputers. The EuroHPC JU will provide up to 35% of the acquisition costs.

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 September 2023, the 83rd HPC User Forum took place in Tucson, Arizona. This update summarizes a presentation from that conference given by Dan Stanzione, Executive Director of Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) and Associate Vice President for Research at University of Texas-Austin. Stanzione presented TACC perspectives on datacenter sustainability including infrastructure improvements and incentivizing users to improve software.

Addressing multiple challenges facing the global HPC community, Microsoft has expressed intent to invest US$3.46B (€3.2B) in Germany over the next two years. Expanding its cloud region in Frankfurt am Main and planning new infrastructure in North Rhine-Westphalia, Microsoft expects the investment to double its existing cloud capacities in Germany, accelerate benefits of AI to German scientists, researchers, and engineers, and train more than 1.2 million individuals in digital skills.

According to a recent Japanese press release from the Institute for Molecular Science (IMS), a research institute corporation under Japan's National Institutes of Natural Sciences, a diverse group of Japanese commercial and academic quantum computing (QC) developers are forming a company, tentatively called the Commercialization Study Platform, to bring to market a next-generation high-speed quantum computer based on research developed at IMS's Omori Laboratory. Ten companies, including the Development Bank of Japan, Fujitsu, Hitachi, NEC, and Hamamatsu Photonics, are participating along with a number of smaller Japanese QC software firms. Each participant is expected to invest in the new company as well as provide human resources and technology. The stated mission of the company is the development of neutral atom quantum computer with intentions of producing a prototype in 2026 and targeting a commercial QC system by 2030. The final company name and terms of investment from corporate backers are not yet finalized.

In September 2023, the 83rd HPC User Forum took place in Tucson, Arizona. This update summarizes a presentation from that conference given by Ti Leggett, Deputy Project Director & Deputy Director of Operations at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL). Leggett presented the sustainability efforts of the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF), including areas of success and challenges in the procurement, operations, and decommissioning processes.

The HPC ecosystem continues to evolve, providing endless avenues to explore and research. Items contributing to these market research opportunities include the rapid introduction and adoption of large language models (LLMs) and other AI-related innovations, increased adoption of HPC resources in the cloud, and heightened emphasis and awareness of sustainability and energy efficiency, to name just a few. The team of analysts at Hyperion Research strive to provide thoughtful, insightful, critical analysis across these topics, as well as the HPC market's many other dimensions. These dimensions include, but are not limited to, market data, technology, innovations, exascale deployments, and vertical application use cases. 2023 proved to be quite eventful, and 2024 is expected to be just as significant.

This update summarizes a presentation from a recent HPC User Forum, given by Amy Henninger, Senior Advisor and Branch Chief of Advanced Computing at the DHS Science and Technology Directorate/Technology Centers. In addition to providing updates on the various clusters and labs under the DHS umbrella and their application spaces, she also gave an update on the department's goals for the future as well as their relationships with new technologies like quantum and AI.

In the past month, two quantum computing (QC) suppliers have announced acquisitions of specialized technology firms that provide components critical to the development and production of their respective QC product offerings, in this case both centered on photonic-based systems. US-based Infleqtion, a provider of both quantum technologies and commercial quantum computer hardware and software, announced it had acquired two integrated silicon photonics companies, SiNoptiq Inc. and Morton Photonics Inc. UK-based ORCA, developer of full-stack photonic QC systems, announced the acquisition of the US-based Integrated Photonics Division of GXC.

Issued in August of 2023, the EuroHPC JU's call for proposals for Innovation Action in Low Latency and High Bandwidth Interconnects closed on January 31, 2024. Intended to support and provide synergies with other EuroHPC I/O, processor, and accelerator programs, proposals were to: Develop a roadmap for European scalable inter-node interconnects targeting HPC exascale and post-exascale systems; Include the inter-node interconnect hardware, address design, development, testing and tape-out, as well as outline the integration into testbeds; Encompass the software, installation, configuration, and management tools for the developed interconnect, driven by the needs of relevant HPC workflows and application requirements; Address a broad range of system requirements (e.g., high bandwidth, low latency, power efficiency, virtualization, scalability, reliability, security).

For 2024 and beyond, Hyperion Research makes these predictions for the worldwide HPC market: 1. Utilization of HPC resources in the cloud will experience accelerating growth as users augment their AI focus on training with inferencing. 2. While speeds and feeds will continue to be important to buyers of storage systems, the primary value point and competitive advantage for data storage solutions will shift to the data platform. 3. System vendors will struggle to a greater degree than hyperscalers in absorbing the accelerated cadence of NVIDIA's GPU roadmap. 4. Interest in procuring on-premises quantum computing (QC) systems will grow, augmenting but not replacing access to QC through the cloud.  

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) recently released a public version of its first ever quantum strategy, outlining NATO's plans to foster a secure, resilient, and competitive quantum ecosystem that is able to respond to the fast pace of technological competition in the quantum sector. Specific goals included supporting development of key quantum technologies to maintain NATO's technological edge, implementing frameworks for hardware and software to enhance operability, and standing up a Transatlantic Quantum Community to strategically engage with government, industry, and academia across the NATO innovation ecosystem.

Surpassing pre-pandemic attendance and achieving new attendance and exhibitor participation records, SC23 in Denver, CO did not disappoint. With over 14,000 on-site attendees and over 435 exhibitors, SC23 provided a vibrant, high-energy environment for the global HPC community to exchange ideas while establishing or extending collaborative partnerships and relationships. As is our custom, the Hyperion Research team of analysts has compiled its primary takeaways and perspectives from the event.

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 September 2023, the 83rd HPC User Forum took place in Tucson, Arizona. This update summarizes a presentation from that conference given by Doug Kothe, Chief Research Officer and Associate Labs Director for Advanced Science & Technology at Sandia National Laboratories. In addition to providing updates on the Exascale Computing Project (ECP) and key insights regarding the Frontier Supercomputer, he discussed the application portfolio, challenges, and goals for ECP.

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 September 2023, the 83rd HPC User Forum took place in Tucson, Arizona. This update summarizes a presentation from that conference given by Doug Kothe, Chief Research Officer and Associate Labs Director for Advanced Science & Technology at Sandia National Laboratories. In addition to providing updates on the Exascale Computing Project (ECP) and key insights regarding the Frontier Supercomputer, he discussed the application portfolio, challenges, and goals for ECP.

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 September 2023, the 83rd HPC User Forum took place in Tucson, Arizona. This update summarizes a presentation from that conference given by Simon Burbidge, career HPC systems expert and RSE Team Lead at DiRAC. In addition to providing updates on the Distributed Research Utilizing Advanced Computing (DiRAC) and its application spaces, he also gave an update on UK HPC activities and goals, and how they compare and contrast with other major global players. Burbidge, previously Director of Advanced Computing Research Centre (ACRC) at University of Bristol, began by noting that despite perhaps being lesser known internationally, DiRAC is a substantial and influential element of the UK HPC ecosystem.

The use of clouds for HPC workloads over the last 12-24 months has undergone a decided shift. Conversations had largely centered around whether cloud-based resources could be reliably utilized at scale at performance levels required for complex HPC workloads. They have now evolved to dialogues seeking understanding of which workloads are capable of being migrated to the cloud to meet a user's cost, performance, security, and support requirements. This is inclusive of traditional HPC modeling and simulation (mod/sim) workloads and modern AI/HPDA/LLM workloads.    

This Hyperion Research study presents the latest five-year forecast (2022-2027) for HPC on-premises technical servers by vertical. Overall, the HPC server market is expected to grow at a 7.7% CAGR to reach $22.3 billion in 2027 as the market recovery continues and exascale system purchase and installations continue to ramp up in the Government Lab vertical.

Innovations are constantly occurring across all aspects of HPC infrastructure. Much of that innovation has been focused on the computing infrastructure: CPU performance once driven by faster clock speeds have evolved to integrating more cores. GPUs have emerged to advance performance of AI-related workloads. Application-specific accelerators are now being introduced to address unique elements of AI applications. Advancements in these areas have created challenges in other areas, primarily related to the increasing power required to run each new generation of processing element. Innovations in equipment cooling and datacenter design and operations are evolving to address the power and cooling challenges. Specifically, immersion cooling has emerged as an option to mitigate increasing power demands and aims to provide substantial benefits to datacenter facilities. DUG Technology (DUG) has fully embraced immersion cooling for its computing infrastructure and provides a proof point for others considering taking the immersion cooling approach.

Introduced at Intel Innovation 2022 as a resource to private beta users, the Intel Developer Cloud was opened to the public as a beta resource at Intel Innovation 2023. The goal is to make new and future hardware platforms available for pre-launch development and testing to give developers, customers, and researchers early and efficient access to Intel technologies from a few months up to a full year ahead of product availability.

HPC in the cloud-related data and insights CSP Market Shares October 2023

HPC in the cloud-related data and insights related to Cloud vs On-Prem Workload Trends October 2023

HPC in the cloud-related data and insights related to Motivators and Limitations for HPC Cloud Users

CIQ, Oracle, and SUSE have partnered to form the Open Enterprise Linux Association (OpenELA), which focuses on community-driven source code for Enterprise Linux. The trade association aims to encourage the development of Linux distributions that are both compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and can uphold open community standards. This arrangement formalizes what the members consider to be the existing de facto standards of transparency, community involvement, security, free access, open redistribution, and expedient updates.

The Historical View of the HPC Server Market by Vendor, 2017- 2022 is a summary of key insights gleaned from our QView database, the market tracking database that profiles HPC server sales and related information that goes back the past 20 years.

The Historical View of the HPC Server Accelerators Market, 2017- 2022 is a summary of key insights gleaned from our QView database, the market tracking database that profiles HPC server sales and related information that goes back the past 20 years.

The Historical View of the On-Premises HPC Server Market by Competitive Segment, 2017-2022 is a summary of key insights gleaned from our QView database, the market tracking database that profiles HPC server sales and related information that goes back the past 20 years.

The Historical View of the HPC On-Premises Server Market in Processors Installed, 2017-2022 is a summary of key insights gleaned from our QView database, the market tracking database that profiles HPC server sales and related information that goes back the past 20 years.

This paper explores the evolution of HPC workloads and how cloud computing has evolved to become a viable tool to complement on-premises capabilities for running large-scale scientific workloads. It looks at the challenges driven by advanced, large-scale scientific workloads, the importance of their resultant research, how cloud-based resources are capable of meeting HPC requirements, and examples of results provided by running large-scale scientific workloads in the cloud.

This Hyperion Research study presents the latest five-year forecast (2022-2027) for HPC on-premises technical servers by region.

The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU), the EU's main governmental body charged with overseeing the EU's HPC ecosystem, has issued a call to engage with small and medium enterprises (SMEs) offering support for competitiveness and innovation. The primary objective of this endeavor is to empower SMEs with advanced HPC capabilities to drive innovation, enhance competitiveness, and overcome challenges in the digitization of R&D and business processes.

atNorth has made the 2023 shortlist for two categories of the UK National Sustainability Awards. This is the second annual National Sustainability Awards, which recognizes organizations within all sectors that are innovating to create a more sustainable and better future. atNorth made the shortlist for the 'Energy Innovation' and the 'Building of the Year' categories. The Energy Innovation Award nomination was for the bespoke direct liquid cooling (DLC) system developed for the atNorth SWE01 datacenter facility in Stockholm, Sweden, in collaboration with CoolIT, a Canadian-based DLC supplier. The DLC and warm water combined system at SWE01 allows for higher rack density and higher peak performance, all while using less power.

The purpose of this study was to gain a better understanding of the capabilities of large language models (LLMs), an emerging class of AI algorithms, to benefit the overall HPC community. Key goals of this effort included describing the base of current and planned HPC-related activity that could incorporate LLMs, assessing the level of ongoing LLM activity within end user organizations, characterizing the interest in general-purpose LLM applications, exploring the prospects for LLM integration into traditional HPC algorithms, and highlighting the key challenges with integrating LLM capability into HPC-based workloads.