Birds of a Feather

Commercial and Industrial HPC Use – What Is Really Needed?

Authors: Florian Berberich (PRACE aisbl, Juelich Supercomputing Centre), Serge Bogaerts (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE)), Philippe Segers (GENCI, France), Guy Lonsdale (scapos AG), Andreas Wierse (Sicos BW GmbH)

Abstract: New HPC technologies offer new opportunities but also bring challenges for the users in a fast-developing HPC ecosystem. In order to get a better understanding and to prepare adapted offers for industrial / commercial HPC users, the EC funded the HPC-GIG project to organize three market studies on the current HPC offers for industry, the current and future needs of industrial and commercial HPC use and the legal and business requirements for industrial/commercial use. In this BoF, we will present the highlights of the market studies and discuss with both industrial users and HPC experts the outlook for future services.

Long Description: HPC is a powerful tool for advancing science and innovation. New HPC technologies offer new opportunities but also bring challenges for the users in a fast-developing HPC ecosystem. Whereas scientific users seem more able to adapt to the fast technological developments it is less evident for industrial or commercial users, especially SMEs. In order to get a better understanding and to prepare adapted offers for industrial / commercial HPC users, the European Commission (EC) funded, through the HPC-GIG project, several market studies. In the BOF we will first present an overview of the findings and recommendations from the three independent market studies: The first study analyses the available and announced/planned offers for HPC usage by industrial/commercial end-users, while the second study investigates current and future technical requirements of such end-users, including emerging scenarios. Finally, the third study examines the legal and business requirements of such end-users going forward, as well as the specific framework and rules for providing HPC access or services.

The EC and the EU member states have a long history of co-funding research and innovation efforts in the HPC field, including novel component and system architectures, system and application software, usage in academic and commercial contexts and networking infrastructure. Scientific use and the needs of European scientists have shaped the research and innovation activities, and the vibrant publicly-funded ecosystem of HPC centres in Europe is mainly used for scientific purposes. Industrial take-up of HPC has happened, and HPC is now an integral part of, for instance, product development lifecycles in aerospace, automotive, and pharma, and commercial services built on top of HPC are being offered in verticals like weather prediction and financial services. Yet, today, most of these commercial and industrial uses of HPC rely on in-house, on-premise systems, rather than co-using HPC centres or taking advantage of Cloud-based PaaS or SaaS services.

Studies of HPC uptake by industry, and targeted projects to broaden the user basis (for instance the Fortissimo series of projects or the SME HPC Adoption Programme in Europe (SHAPE) by PRACE), have shown that there is a significant barrier for new commercial or industrial end-users to embrace and profit from use of HPC, mainly because of the high complexity of integrating in-house HPC systems with typical company IT infrastructure, the significant up-front costs for HPC systems, and the steep learning curve required to become productive in using complex HPC application software.

In this BOF we present the results of the marked studies and discuss with industrial HPC users and HPC experts possible new services and collaborations in order to define a strategy for public funded HPC centers who want to engage with industrial users. This discussion will help to define viable goals for the HPC centres within the EuroHPC JU infrastructure in Europe and also for other HPC infrastructures worldwide.



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