Quantum #80

Well, that was a busy week! 3 days learning all about HPC leadership whilst also trying to juggle the day job. Anyone want to come play CEO instead of me so I can focus on the fun stuff? 😁 

We finally released our paper on optimising financial services HPC code (or risk systems as their usually called by the people that work on them)  on AMD CPUs. Full details and links down below.

The HPC Leadership Institute course at Barcelona Supercomputing Centre was great, if you’re on the fence about doing the course, just do it or at least one of the shorter lectures at SC. It’s quite focused on the procurement, operation and management of HPC so if that’s something you need to do in your day job it’s a pretty good cheat code to level up.

Unfortunately the timing meant that I couldn’t see the new quantum computers installed in the original chapel building 😢 I can’t begin to tell you how gutted I was about that. I guess it means I need to find an excuse to go back.

Writing the cloud updates this week was fun. It’s worth reading them just for the commentary and seeing Google publicly take a shot at Microsoft, but the rest of the HPC world seems pretty quiet this week. Either that or I was just too preoccupied to keep an eye on what’s being going on. I’ll tell you what though, so far, I think I was right about things getting more heterogenous in 2025… anyway it’s all below.

In The News

Updates from the big three clouds on all things HPC.

HPC Cloud Updates WE 05 Oct 2025

Updates to AWS, Azure & GCP in the last week relevant for HPC practitioners. Amazon makes some updates to PCS and its similarly named cousin. Google takes a shot at Microsoft and Microsoft gives show how to use Active Directory for cloud HPC.

Flux by HMx LabsHamza

ARM talks to Next Platform about its role in the data centre

Arm Says Neoverse Is A More Universal Compute Substrate Than X86

Back at the end of July, we had a discussion with CPU maker AMD and the topic of conversation was hybrid cloud. In the course of that conversation, one of

The Next PlatformTimothy Prickett Morgan

Meta is taking a punt on RISC-V. We really need to get our hands on one too to try out. I wonder if Tenstorrent will let us have one to play with.

Meta Buys Rivos To Accelerate Compute Engine Engineering

Of all of the hyperscalers and cloud builders, Meta Platforms has always been the one that we expected to design and have manufactured its own CPU and XPU

The Next PlatformTimothy Prickett Morgan

From HMx Labs

We’re finally released our paper on optimising financial services HPC on AMD CPUs. This isn’t the end though. There’s so much more to come so stay tuned!

Optimising Financial Services HPC Workloads on AMD EPYC 4th and 5th Generation Processors

We take a look at optimising financial risk analytics on modern AMD CPUs. Turns out we had quite a lot to say. About 5500 words in fact!

Flux by HMx LabsHamza

The video of Simon McIntosh-Smith’s presentation about Isambard-AI at HPC Club is now available:

HPC Club: Isambard-AI Presentation Video

Simon McIntosh-Smith presents Isambard-AI at HPC Club, captured on video for those of you that missed it.

Flux by HMx LabsHamza

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