Diversity in HPC
Will 2025 be the year in which supercomputers are no longer homogenous?
As the Unites States slowly dismantles DEI I think we’re about see the world of HPC embrace diversity in an unprecedented way. I mean diversity of silicon rather than humans though.
And to those proclaiming the death of x86, I’d like to remind you that while we may already be calling the death of Intel, the x86_64 architecture was produced by more than just Intel. Not only that, but AMD’s latest (aptly named) EPYC CPUs are just as if not more power efficient (when performance adjusted) than their Arm based counterparts.
That’s not a reason to sit back that assume x86_64 is the only game in town. Sure, HPC clusters used to be comprised of dedicated homogenous hardware. Those days are gone. Get used to it. If you want cost-effective, large-scale compute it future you’re looking at a heterogenous compute environment that comprises multiple CPU architectures including Arm, x86_64, RISC_V as well as multiple accelerators including GPGPUs, FPGAs and ASICs.
I think In 2025 we are going to see an expansion in diversity of silicon in the world of HPC for a variety of not only technical reasons but also economic and geopolitical ones.
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