By Hamza in Quantum Weekly — Jun 8, 2026

Quantum #115

Issue #115 of the weekly HPC newsletter by HMx Labs. Multi cloud HPC workloads with Fuzzball, more silicon news from Intel and Microsoft and AWS gives us better observability for PCS.

The silicon theme continues this week, but we do have some other non-hardware related supercomputing news too for once! Also HPC Club reservations are now open so if you haven’t booked yet I’d get on that pretty quickly 😉

CIQ, makers of Rocky Linux, have released an update to Fuzzball to become a fully fledged multi cloud workload management and HPC scheduling solution, putting it directly in competition with products such as YellowDog. It may also be a contender in some regards to using your own scheduler with Parallel Work’s ACTIVATE or FINOS’ new Open Resource Broker. The HPC scheduling space can sometimes feel like it consists of little more than Slurm but lift the covers a little and there are quite a few options! We’ll need to get our scheduler selection tool updated with Fuzzball and its new capabilities.

Staying on the software side of the news, AWS has also done something rather rare by giving us observability out of the box for PCS (Parallel Compute Service)! Anyone that’s been in HPC for more than a day will realise how useful and rare this sort of thing is. It takes the form of managed Grafana so should feel fairly familiar to most people.

Diving back into the silicon news, we have Intel firmly back from the dead and now taking aim at the AI space with not only new CPUs but accelerators and partnerships too. Talking of Intel, we’ve just spent the past week benchmarking their CPUs for financial services workloads. The data will naturally be available via FLOPx but I’m wondering if a (short) white paper comparing the various models to highlight what (clock speed/ L3 cache) impacts performance in this space would be of interest? Let me know.

Lastly, Microsoft has decided its foray into ARM CPUs is worth continuing with and will be releasing new Cobalt 200 based VMs. The future is definitely looking much more heterogenous.