Rescale’s 2021 State of Cloud HPC Report Reveals Major Cloud Adoption Trends in Research and Science

World’s most popular cloud platform for HPC workloads shares aggregate adoption trends across more than 300 customers, spotlights multi-cloud, explosion of simulation software and specialized architectures

Rescale, the leading hybrid HPC cloud platform enabling intelligent computing for digital R&D, published its inaugural State of Cloud HPC Report. The report shares aggregate cloud adoption trends in the HPC industry, leveraging usage data across Rescale’s more than 300 customers and unrivaled catalogue of more than 660 supported HPC simulation packages and more than 100 specialized hardware architectures.

High Performance Computing is a massive industry ($55 billion by 2024¹) that is the lifeblood of research and science innovation. From supersonic jets to developing c**** for pandemics – research engineers rely on HPC for algorithmically-complex workloads running on massive datasets.

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Today this HPC industry is still running mostly on-premises in supercomputers and Linux clusters in private datacenters. But the rate of growth in specialized architectures, the diversity of options for simulation software, and the general pressure to bring more agility to research engineers to rival the “developer experience” their enterprise software developers enjoy – has created a massive surge in moving HPC workloads to the cloud.

The report — “Big Compute: 2021 State of Cloud HPC Report” — reveals key trends in how HPC hardware and specialized software are accelerating cloud adoption across science, engineering and business.

An Explosion of Simulation Software and Specialized Architectures

The simulation software market is on fire – an industry expected to reach $21 billion by 2025². Across Rescale’s library of 660 software packages, most organizations run three or more simulation software packages. ANSYS Fluent is the most dominant simulation software provider across most HPC use cases, but within every industry, domain-specific challengers are ever- growing. For example, CFD++ (Aerospace), LS-DYNA (Energy), CONVERGE 3.0 (Automotive). It’s a great time to be a science engineer, in terms of the diversity of simulation software choice, and this report catalogues some of these emergent simulation softwares in specific industries.

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Multi-Cloud is Uniquely Valuable for HPC and an Operational Reality

Each of the cloud service providers have made investments in unique specialized hardwares (core clock speed, core memory, core I/O, high bandwidth interconnects, GPUs, etc). The combination of a fast growing catalogue of HPC software packages, up against different public cloud providers offering different advantages in underlying architectures is driving a multi-cloud trend. This report shows that more than 50 percent of HPC users are using more than one public cloud provider, up from 35% in 2018.

HPC Leaders Seek to Close Talent Gaps and Deliver on Digital R&D

Business leaders understand how cloud changed software development and are now looking to apply cloud transformation to R&D. Scientists and engineers are specialists in the domains they serve. Cloud providers are specialists in cloud infrastructure. But the universe of engineers who are specialized in both the applied science domains and cloud infrastructure is very small, exacerbated by a talent shortage in the HPC industry. This report found that for most HPC execs, they are looking to automation to deliver more holistic R&D solutions including workflow automation to help their organizations get the most out of the cloud.

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