New artificial intelligence-powered applications and the mountains of data generated by IoT sensors are set to drive demand for high performance computing (HPC) solutions, a new report from GlobalData claims.
The data and analytics company says the market for HPC solutions and AI servers will become “increasingly vibrant and competitive” over the next five years.
Even despite disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, IT and cloud vendors have identified significant demand for more powerful computer processing capabilities.
“Traditional HPC use cases including financial services, scientific and medical research, and natural resource exploration and extraction remain as important as ever,” explained Chris Drake, Principal Analyst at GlobalData. “However, they are being joined by new applications from an expanding range of industries, including those that leverage AI and large volumes of data.”
Besides new applications, the industry is expected to focus on enabling the consumption of IT solutions with more flexibility, mostly through the as-a-service models. GlobalData expects these models to become an important means for the future adoption of AI and HPC servers and a strong competitor to hyperscale cloud providers.
“The hyperscalers have been strengthening their own ability to offer HPC and supercomputing as a service and, in June 2021, Microsoft announced the general availability of its new cloud supercomputing offering for AI and HPC workloads, powered by NVIDIA A100 Tensor Core GPUs. Microsoft Azure joins Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Oracle, which all now offer NVIDIA A100-based cloud services,” Drake added.
“Growing demand for more powerful processors is also driving competition among chip manufacturers such as Intel, AMD and NVIDIA. NVIDIA is making a multi-pronged attack to become a major player in the enterprise IT market, starting at the very high end.”