HPC Budget Allocation Map: Budget Expectations

HPC Budget Allocation Map: Budget Expectations

Intersect360 Research surveyed the High Performance Computing user community to complete its eighth Site

Budget Allocation Map, a look at how HPC sites divide and spend their budgets. We surveyed users on their spending in seven top-level categories: hardware, software, facilities, staffing, services, cloud/utility/outsourcing computing, and other. Each category was further divided into constituent subcategories, resulting in 27 unique items included in the analysis. Additionally, the respondents were asked about their future budget expectations This report examines the change in budget from the prior year, expected budget change over the next two years, and key areas in which users see significant changes occurring over the next two years.

Highlights from this study include:

• Twice as many respondents (43%) reported increases in their budgets from the prior year compared to 21% who reported a decrease in their budgets.
• More than half of all respondents expect their budgets to increase by 1% or more over the next two years, with 42% expecting budgets to increase by more than 5%.
• Commercial sites showed the most optimism with 63% expecting budgets to increase by at least 1% over the next two years and only 4% of commercial respondents expecting a decline. Some softening of the growth expectations at commercial sites is being seen with 33% expecting budgets to remain flat compared to 15% reported in our 2014 study.
• Academic and government sites are less optimistic than commercial sites about budget increases over
the next two years. About 17% of academic sites and 22% of government sites expect budgets to decline by 1% or more over the next two years.