Quantum #62
Issue #62 of the weekly HPC newsletter by HMx Labs. ISC Fever sets in, HMx Towers is overrun with TikTokers and some actual HPC news
ISC25 in just over a week and it seems we will also have The AI Summit taking place in London at the same time. Somehow the latter completely passed me by till this week. Interesting that the timings overlap with ISC…
I hadn’t planned to attend either, but with the number of people that have requested a meeting at ISC and a couple of the presentations that have been pointed out to me I do wonder if I’m making a mistake.
Traditionally, the financial services industry has pretty much shunned all of the classical HPC events and conferences. Given most of our clients are still FSI, I’d been following the same playbook. But then I’ve always, possibly incorrectly, viewed ISC as an opportunity to engage with clients and potential clients. While I doubt that will be happening for us anytime soon at ISC, perhaps we are missing out better relationships with partners and other vendors by not being present? It’s hard to say and there are so few people that can provide an opinion or experience in this.
In fact, the whole absence of FSI in HPC is probably worthy of a post in itself. Yea yea I know there’s no MPI and its only HTC and not HPC… it’s still more similar than different. Especially with 128 core CPUs making it questionable how much CPU based code should just be multi threaded instead of multi process with MPI… (I’m going to get beaten up now aren’t I).
HMx Towers was taken over this weekend by WatchShuffle for TikTok videos of all things. They have managed to achieve what my daughters and wife have been failing to do for a number of years – stopped me working at the weekend! (and yes I used an em-dash and yes I did it without using AI)
Expect shuffle dance videos from HMx Labs on TikTok soon. Or Not 😛
In The News
Updates from the big three clouds on all things HPC.
Updates from the big three clouds on all things HPC.... does this need a better name? HPC Cloud Release Notes?
This is probably the most seen bit of news in my HPC feeds this wee. For those of you who are not US based and like me didn’t know, DOE is Department of Energy (not Education as it would be in the UK).
The choice of architecture here is telling, but to me not surprising. It’s been a long time since HPC has been built on its own dedicated silicon and where are you getting the most FLOPs per buck these days but AI hardware? The move to ARM64 is particularly interesting. Whilst ARM64 has seen much improved adoption and support over the last few years it still lags in some places, especially more legacy and specialised codebases. Maybe this will change that.
staff
I’m not a fan of all the AI hype but this is a genuinely interesting insight into operating systems for an age where data processing is more important than ever. Or it might just all be marketing fluff. I’m not sure yet.
Timothy Prickett Morgan
From HMx Labs
Looks like we might have an interesting extension to HPC Club. Response so far has been stronger than I would have guessed. Let’s see if that translates to bookings.
Yes, I’m teasing. I think I might aim for a public launch at the next HPC Club….
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