By Hamza in Quantum Weekly — Mar 23, 2026

Quantum #104

Issue #104 of the weekly HPC newsletter by HMx Labs. Updates from HPSFCon and GTC. A new GPU VM from Azure.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that the only HPC related news last week came out of Nvidia GTC. But you’d be wrong. Whilst GTC completely overshadowed it, last week we also had the second HPSFCon (High Performance Software Foundation Conference). I swear Nvidia does this on purpose. Last year GTC clashed with the International Supercomputing Conference. What’s up with that Jensen? Not cool man.

Although it remains a little DOE centric still, and nobody can escape the monster that is AI, at least HPSFCon attempted to showcase some actual real uses of AI in HPC and scientific research. The levels of hype are also measurably lower! There isn’t a great deal of content available from HPSFCon just yet but there is a good video on converged computing and agentic AI in scientific research including using agentic AI to run and control your HPC jobs. If you’re already familiar with the concepts of converged computing and Flux framework, skip to 18:54.

Jensen pulled out faster inferencing from his hat at GTC with the Groq acquisition being put to use. He also showed of a pipeline of $1Trillion in sales though the financial markets don’t seem too convinced.

Nvidia is getting a lot of heat on DLSS, and I’m not a gamer so I won’t comment on DLSS directly, but Jensen’s presentation mentioned how DLSS is the first application of using a combination of a physics model combined with a stochastic generative AI to produce something structured. I understand its application in video games has done down like a seg fault in a MPI job just before completion, but that sounds kinda exciting. It aligns with the idea of combining genAI with traditional quantitative finance model and if things like Vera-Rubin/Groq/ ASICs really can drop the cost of inference sufficiently this space starts to look genuinely interesting.

Then again, it’s probably not that at all and just a bunch more random matrix math being hyped as sentience yet again and the gamers are probably right.

Oh, Microsoft Azure announced a Blackwell RTX Pro powered VM too.

Anyone get any decent swag at GTC?