Quantum #106
Issue #106 of the weekly HPC newsletter by HMx Labs. How are we going to power all the GPUs? And which ones are worth powering up? France goes Exascale.
MLCommons dropped version 6 of their benchmarks for AI inference last week amongst increasing concern for how we’re going to power all the GPUs that Nvidia is cranking out. That’s probably just as well, given we’ll have to figure out which GPUs are going to be worth powering up and which ones we just leave sat in their boxes. Though as any seasoned HPC professionals will know, we probably should have started with the benchmarking and optimisation rather than the grandiose build plans.
Whilst optimisation doesn’t give you the numbers you need to win the billionaire *cough* rocket *cough* measuring contest it might just give you a path to usable AI inference at scale. Might. If you’re running converged classical and AI models the latest MLPerf Inference v6.0 benchmarks are probably quite handy. More details and the results down below. Also HPC Wire took this moment to remind us that its system performance that will count.
Most readers of this were already aware that we’re never going to be able to power all the data centres that have been provisioned, planned or promised. I guess current affairs means that the rest of the news cycle is catching up to that reality. Microsoft signed a deal with Chevron and that’s not something a younger version of me ever thought I’d hear myself say. And Google has decided that natural gas is the way forward to power AI. Maybe they didn’t get the memo about what’s going on in the world.
Against this backdrop of news, France decided it was time to join the Exascale compute club. Not sure that means anything anymore with the HPC Top 500 being less and less relevant, missing as it is anything from the hyperscalers. I guess it still means something in the scientific community. Or in the measuring contests for politicians rather than billionaires.
That was a rather cynical take this week. I better go outside and get some sun. And some Easter chocolate.
In The News
Updates from the big three clouds on all things HPC.
MLCommons releases v6 of their inference benchmark. Results here
MLCommons
Powering Data centres becomes critical
https://www.axios.com/2026/04/02/google-natural-gas-ai-power-energy
We might not get (or need?) all the compute that was planned
Joe Wilkins
France set to join the Exascale club
System performance is what counts
https://www.hpcwire.com/2026/04/02/forget-about-chips-its-the-system-that-matters-for-ai/
From HMx Labs
This was just an April Fool’s joke (though Corey Quinn says this entire category for faux series A pitch decks as a joke isn’t funny anymore).
I hope you’re enjoying your Easter chocolate!
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