Technology Spotlight
Supermicro-AMD Partnership Creates Strong Momentum in HPC-AI
Convergence Market
Sponsored by Supermicro and AMD
Steve Conway and Melissa RiddleFebruary 2022

HYPERION RESEARCH OPINION
HPC is nearly indispensable at the forefront of AI R&D, not only for established scientific andengineering applications but also for economically important new commercial uses including precision
medicine, automated driving systems, cybersecurity, fraud and anomaly detection, businessintelligence, affinity marketing, and IoT/edge/smart cities initiatives.
HPC-enabled AI is attracting more worldwide attention recently, because it indicates where the larger,mainstream AI market is likely headed in the future. The biggest gifts HPC is giving to the mainstream
AI market are 40-plus years of experience with parallelism and the related abilities to process andmove data quickly, on-premises and in more highly distributed computing environments such as
clouds and other hyperscale environments. The HPC community is also an important incubator for
applying heterogeneous architectures to the growing number of heterogeneous workflows in the publicand private sectors.
Through the new commercial use cases, HPC has already entered the mainstream AI market andpromises to become increasingly important there. In our newest worldwide study (August 2021), 80%of the surveyed 141 HPC sites reported that they are already running one or more of the commercial
AI use cases. This confirms a trend Hyperion Research has been tracking for a decade, where Global
2000 firms are increasingly adopting HPC to support business operations in enterprise data centers(as opposed to the traditional use of HPC for upstream R&D in dedicated HPC data centers).

February 2022

Hyperion Research #HR4.0011.02.03.2022

SITUATION OVERVIEW
The global HPC and AI markets are converging to create a projected $19.9 billion combined HPC
server market opportunity in 2025, up from $13.7 billion in 2020. Adding storage, software andtechnical support revenue lifts the 2025 forecast to $37.8 billion. Hyperion Research forecasts that theAI portion of the HPC server market, including machine learning, deep learning, and other AI methods,
will nearly triple (22.8% CAGR) from 2020 to 2025 (Table 1). This is nearly three times faster than thenon-AI portion (8.0% CAGR).

TABLE 1
Forecast: Worldwide HPC-Enabled AI (ML, DL, & Other AI) Server Revenue ($M)
2019

2020

2021

2022

2023

2024

2025

CAGR '20-'25

ML in HPC

667

719

806

1,018

1,213

1,368

1,569

16.9%

DL in HPC

209

263

341

501

692

899

1,133

33.9%

Other AI in HPC

4257

70

98

129

162

204

29.0%

Total AI Server Revenue

918

1,039

1,216

1,618

2,034

2,429

2,905

22.8%

Source: Hyperion Research, 2021

HPC-Enabled AI Market Has Distinct Requirements
Some applications use analytics alone, but many HPC-enabled AI applications benefit from both dataanalytics and simulation methodologies. Simulation isn’t becoming less important with the rise of AI.
This frequent pairing of simulation and analytics indicates that HPC system designs need to be bothcompute-friendly and data-friendly. Newer designs are starting to reverse the increasing computecentrism of recent decades and establish a better balance. Newer architectures combine fast
processing, fast data movement, and highly responsive storage for a comprehensive and flexible
solution.
Servers for HPC-enabled AI use require capable CPUs, paired with GPUs or other accelerators fordata-intensive tasks. In 2020, x86-based CPUs represented 93% of all HPC base processors.
Hyperion Research projects that x86-based CPUs will remain highly dominant for the foreseeable
future, but alternatives, including Arm-based CPUs in the next few years and later RISC-V processors,
will establish footholds in the global HPC market.
Overall, AI workloads demand HPC systems that are tightly integrated/dense (hardware-softwarestorage-packaging), highly available (fast builds), highly reliable (factory-assembled, factory-tested),customizable/flexible, environmentally friendly (Green Initiative), affordable and easy to use, withstrong technical support available from the vendor. In addition to providing such support, vendors thatflourish in this specialized space also tend to be customer-centric, with a long-term vision aimed at
supporting customers' evolving requirements with early availability of state-of-the-art technology.

©2022 Hyperion Research#HR4.0011.02.03.2022

2|PageKey Selection Criteria and Return on Investment
HPC users consistently rank price performance on their desired applications as their top selection
criterion for their next HPC server purchase, followed by application performance. Similarly, return oninvestment for an HPC system is most commonly defined as price/performance on the users' specificapplications. Despite the lengthy list of requirements for AI systems, recent survey data shows that AI
users within HPC also follow these trends when asked to prioritize their concerns.
Supermicro and AMD have had some significant wins recently because their solutions are designed toaddress these top requirements for varying workloads and deliver the highest ROI (price/performanceon top applications). The Corona system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, for example,
features Supermicro’s 4U 8 GPU servers, AMD Radeon Instinct MI50 GPUs and AMD EPYC 7002
CPUs. According to LLNL Deputy Associate Director of Computing Jim Brase, “the Corona system is amajor advance in our capability for predictive biomedical modeling for COVID-19,” and this architecture
provided a "performance boost [that] will help the Corona system lead the way in accelerating
pandemic response.”
Goethe University also recently partnered with Supermicro and AMD when adding to their Center for
Scientific Computing, ultimately selecting Supermicro’s 4U 8 GPU A+ server with AMD Radeon Instinct
MI50 GPUs and AMD EPYC CPUs. According to Goethe University Chair for HPC Architecture Dr.
Volker Lindenstruth, this resulted in "a balanced system that can easily be utilized by a wide range ofscientists who require a scalable and optimized cluster of fast servers for their research. Especially thedesign that allows the integration of eight GPUs and up to two 200Gb/s connectivity network cards
without any PCI Express switch provides clear advantages for application performance.”

The Supermicro-AMD Partnership Has Established Strong Momentum
Both Supermicro and AMD have shown strong growth recently in both HPC and the overall IT space,highlighted by promising developments such as contributions to the exascale race, AI-specifictechnologies, and GPUs.
AMD's share of the worldwide x86 CPU server market is at historically high levels, leaping to 22.5% insecond-quarter 2021. The company has also recorded impressive gains in the HPC subset of thatmarket. Several of the world's leading HPC sites have told Hyperion Research that the technicalstrength and cost-effectiveness of 3rd Gen AMD EPYC server processors make them hard not toconsider seriously.
Many leading HPC sites have advanced from consideration to acquisition with AMD technologies now
supporting some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. AMD's strong momentum in the HPCand HPC-enabled AI markets can be attributed to the company's technical prowess and vision thatassigns strong importance to these markets. AMD's fabless relationship with TSMC gives the company
added flexibility and the opportunity to focus on developing industry-leading technologies, while
partnerships with Supermicro and other OEMs provide strong marketing-sales channels.
Supermicro's recent momentum has been just as impressive. Revenue for the firm's 2021 fourth fiscalquarter ended June 30 exceeded $1 billion for the first time and jumped 19% from the company's 2020
fourth quarter.
The partnership with AMD is centered around Supermicro's A+ servers, a broad portfolio of multi-node,
blade, GPU server systems for HPC, cloud, and enterprise computing. These servers (e.g., the4124GS and the high-density 8U 40-GPU SuperBlade system with 200 Gb/s InfiniBand switch) are©2022 Hyperion Research#HR4.0011.02.03.2022

3|Pagetypically outfitted for HPC-enabled AI with 3rd Gen AMD EPYC series processors, along with AMD
Instinct MI200 (or MI100) series accelerators or NVIDIA A100 GPUs. Specifically, Supermicro's
newest Universal GPU system incorporates AMD Instinct MI250 accelerators and future models are
expected to support AMD Instinct MI210 accelerators. The company isn't at liberty to name customers,
but they already include one of the world's largest social networking companies, a major automotive
firm, and a Global 500 manufacturer.

FUTURE OUTLOOKHyperion Research forecasts that the HPC market will continue to exhibit robust growth, propelled bythe HPC users' perennial need for more computing power and newer factors including the global
exascale race, HPC adoption by Global1000 firms, cloud computing and the rise of AI and other dataintensive methodologies. HPC is a bellwether technology for AI, nearly indispensable at the forefront of
AI R&D today and showing where the mainstream AI market is likely headed in the not-distant future.
AMD and Supermicro, separately and as collaborators, have established strong momentum in theoverall HPC market and the superfast-growing AI portion of this market. These companies are well
positioned to benefit substantially from the market growth that Hyperion Research projects.

About Hyperion Research, LLC
Hyperion Research provides data-driven research, analysis and recommendations for technologies,
applications, and markets in high performance computing and emerging technology areas to helporganizations worldwide make effective decisions and seize growth opportunities. Research includes
market sizing and forecasting, share tracking, segmentation, technology, and related trend analysis,
and both user & vendor analysis for multi-user technical server technology used for HPC and HPDA
(high performance data analysis). Hyperion Research provides thought leadership and practicalguidance for users, vendors, and other members of the HPC community by focusing on key market
and technology trends across government, industry, commerce, and academia.

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