Quantum #69
Issue #69 of the weekly HPC newsletter by HMx Labs. Beowulf clusters, vibe coding and Glenn K Lockwood Day. Quite an exciting week really!

Everyone’s talking about Jevon’s Paradox, usually in relation to developer capacity or GPU capacity. What everyone has failed to tell me is that it also applies to my own time! HMx Labs has gained a few people this year, some of them taken on with the explicit goal of trying to reduce the amount of work I have on my plate. Did it work? Err, no!
It just means I have now found ways to fill up windows of time with work where I couldn’t before. Now I can be on my phone discussing work and delegating it to other people whilst waiting for the tube or my daughter to finish getting into pyjamas so I can put her to bed. Hmm..

This weekend, with my wife and kids getting drenched at a scout camp, I managed not only to get a new Beowulf cluster up and running but also process all the benchmarking data from a couple of hefty AMD machines we’ve had the pleasure to play with. The power data in particular was really interesting. I’d love to get my hands on similar data for some ARM CPUs. Fat chance of that happening for Graviton but maybe someone can hook us up with some Neoverse CPUs?
You’ll have to hang tight for the complete narrative on those AMD CPUs. I need to find time to write a white paper on it. Here’s a sneak preview of some of the power data though. 😉

The rest of your HPC roundup from the week is below of course
In The News
Updates from the big three clouds on all things HPC. Nothing to see this week.

Glenn K. Lockwood has left Microsoft and joined Vast. He had an interesting take on the state of HPC which he shared whilst between jobs. I’m not sure I agree with all of it but it is an interesting read.

Isambard-AI, the UK’s new largest supercompute officially launched last week

This is quite an interesting read on the history and possible future of interconnects, not only in HPC but maybe everywhere

From HMx Labs
We’re hiring. Not a HPC role but as data and compute seem to be merging who knows in future…

Friday fun

This wasn’t originally included as a Randon Byte but has been retrospectively added given the engagement it had on LinkedIn

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