Another Monday, and though a little later than usual (which is not because of our planned maintenance yesterday 😁), another issue of your weekly HPC news. The delay is  just me deciding to have a lie in this Easter Monday rather than be up and working at 5am or getting the article queued up and ready to release automatically over the weekend.

The DC maintenance went well. Hardware that has been sat on the workbench and on my desk for almost a year is now finally racked! All the right alarms went off when we shut it down and turned off again when it came back online… so that’s good. Though we appear to have missed losing one site to site VPN tunnel which wasn’t picked up till an engineer spotted a failing CD pipeline. Oops.

No prizes I’m afraid if you’re playing spot the difference with the picture from last week 😇

In The News

A quiet week in HPC news from the cloud service providers really

HPC Cloud Updates WE 20 Apr 2025

Updates to AWS, Azure & GCP in the last week relevant for HPC practitioners. Quiet week but there is a new region in Azure and AWS gives it take on cloud for HPC in financial services.

Flux by HMx LabsHamza

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you Next Platform for calling out the stupid statement from Google about Ironwood TPUs being 23 times faster than El Capitan whilst happily comparing Apples to CPUs. I was wondering how long it would be before someone called them on this.

Stacking Up Google’s “Ironwood” TPU Pod To Other AI Supercomputers

As part of the pre-briefings ahead of the Google Cloud Next 2025 conference last week and then during the keynote address, the top brass at Google kept

The Next PlatformTimothy Prickett Morgan

If you were wondering, like I have been, how we will power all these new data centres our AI overlords are demanding be built, Deloitte has a report for you. Sounds like they’ll be powered by good old fashioned Hopium then.

Deloitte Reports on Nuclear Power and the HPC-AI Data Center Energy Gap - High-Performance Computing News Analysis | insideHPC

Even as the HPC-AI sector cheers on more powerful chips, denser servers, faster fabrics, bigger memory and mammoth, multi-hundreds of billion-dollar AI data centers, a voice is whispering in the industry’s ear: “Where’s the electricity for all this?” Good point! It’s generally assumed the data center energy gap will be filled by some combination of […]

High-Performance Computing News Analysis | insideHPCDoug Black

From HMx Labs

Some Easter fun with AI

Easter Eggs in HPC

Are there any Easter eggs hidden in HPC code or am I just being fooled by LLMs claiming there are?

Flux by HMx LabsHamza

And on the other end of the spectrum in terms of seriousness

What Does Cloud Compute Look Like in an Isolationist Future?

What happens to the way we use cloud compute in a world that isn’t based on a global free trade movement?

Flux by HMx LabsHamza

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