Although large organisations tend to have a goal of minimizing the number of languages and platforms they depend on, rarely does this turn out to be the case in practice. HPC systems in particular are expensive assets which could never justify themselves if they could only run one kind of workload in one particular language :-)

If I had to guess, you're working in a business unit that is heavily invested in perl and so sticking other stuff in that environment is perceived as an unnecessary future maintenance burden. The HPC system on the other hand is perhaps shared across multiple business units who don't have the exact same stacks as each other so it's flexible in that way.

python + pandas is pretty awesome though, I was able to delete thousands of lines old perl code dealing with irregular time series when I re-wrote with pandas - it made sense in that instance to ditch the old perl code, it doesn't always though.