2022 HPC Market Analysis: Growth Trends, Cloud, Storage, and AI Enablement

Hyperion Research released a 2022 HPC market analysis covering traditional HPC, AI (ML/DL/Graph), cloud computing, storage, applications, energy consumption, cooling, and quantum computing.

The report, spanning ten chapters and nearly one hundred pages, focuses on HPC market size, HPC cloud, storage, networking, and applications.

In 2021 the overall HPC market (servers, storage, cloud, services, middleware, applications) reached $348 billion, with servers holding the largest share, followed by storage and cloud.

Among on‑premise HPC vendors, HPE and Dell together account for 56% of the market (34.2% and 21.8% respectively), while other vendors each hold less than 10%.

Key on‑premise HPC applications include academic research, government labs, mechanical design, GIS, biosciences, and CAE.

From 2019 to 2021 the HPC market grew steadily; in 2021 on‑premise HPC reached $296.97 billion, and including HPC cloud the total reached $348 billion.

Hyperion forecasts a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of over 6.9% for the next five years, with the E‑class system segment growing fastest at 16% and overall supercomputers at 6.6%.

HPC cloud was the fastest‑growing segment in 2022, expanding over 23% to $62 billion, and is projected to maintain a 17.6% CAGR over the next five years.

AI‑enabled servers are expected to achieve a 22% CAGR, while the number of E‑class supercomputers (2017‑2020) is projected to increase by 31‑45 units, mainly in China, Europe, and the United States.

Storage shows the highest growth among HPC components; about 20% of on‑premise HPC spending goes to storage, with customers willing to increase storage investment by an additional 5%.

In HPC cloud, storage accounts for one‑third of total spending, with persistent storage costing more than twice that of temporary storage; cloud storage expenses reached $17 billion in 2021, growing 2.3 times faster than on‑premise storage.

The leading HPC storage vendors are Dell (21.3% share), followed by IBM, HPE, Lenovo, and DDN.

Large‑scale HPC deployments typically use a mix of NAS/scale‑out distributed storage and parallel file systems: NFS holds 80.3% of the market, Lustre 46%, GPFS 22%, and BeeGFS 6%.

Network trends show a shift toward converged networking as bandwidth increases, with system‑system links dominated by Ethernet (100 Gb/s 47%) and InfiniBand (EDR/HDR 31.9%); system‑storage links are also primarily Ethernet (47.8%) and InfiniBand (34.9%).

HPC market growth is projected to reach $49.5 billion in 2021, a 6.8% increase.

Following the end of CentOS support, Ubuntu is becoming the preferred migration target, as indicated by Hyperion’s research.

GPU acceleration remains a top priority, with 87.8% of users employing at least one GPU‑accelerated application and an average of 7.5 accelerators per system.

For the full report, readers can download the Hyperion Research SC22 HPC Market Update (2022) via the provided links.