Quantum #83

Quantum really is gearing up to give AI a run for its money on the hype cycle this week. Mostly I guess due to Google’s announcement of quantum advantage with their Willow chip. More on that and Uncle Sam getting in on the action below. 

While I can’t claim quantum advantage, we did announce the next HPC Club last week so if you haven’t already, sign up for a spot to catch up on the gossip from SC25 and talk about the future of CPUs, GPUs and any other PUs in HPC. We have Nvidia confirmed (subject to the usual internal approvals), waiting on the others. Anyone have a contact at Arm we can ask to come along?

Oh, and I also setup a WhatsApp group for adhoc coffee/lunch/dinner if you happen to work or travel to London. DM me if you’d like to be added to it.

The other big news from last week was of course the AWS outage. You’ll be glad to know we weren’t impacted and our DNS (running on a Raspberry Pi) kept working just fine 😁

I should also point out though that this doesn’t mean our systems are more resilient than those at AWS. It just means we got lucky. When you do your post mortems around the impact of this, try and remember that. Getting lucky isn’t good architecture but acknowledging where you got lucky will help you build good systems. Even in HPC.

Have a good week and don’t let the DNS bugs bite.

In The News

Updates from the big three clouds on all things HPC.

HPC Cloud Updates WE 26 Oct 2025

Updates to AWS, Azure & GCP in the last week relevant for HPC practitioners. Google compile and run 100k applications across multiple CPU ISAs. AWS makes another tweak to PCS and gives us more EC2 metrics in CloudWatch and Azure has a new region coming up.

Flux by HMx LabsHamza

Google have claimed quantum advantage (again) with its Willow chip. I’ll wait a few weeks to see how long it holds up this time before breaking out the celebratory dance though.  Meanwhile, the US government seems to be busy getting its mitts into quantum too

Google Claims Verifiable Quantum Advantage for ‘Willow’ Chip

Google has issued a blog in which the company claims that its “Willow” quantum chip has achieved the first-ever demonstration of verifiable quantum advantage. “This milestone is a critical step .... - Read more from Inside HPC & AI News.

Inside HPC & AI News | High-Performance Computing & Artificial Intelligencestaff

While we’re still talking about quantum, Alice and Bob and Hyperion Research have some advice on how to get ready… I’m still not convinced but there’s no harm in being informed right?

Webinar: How to Prepare for the Onset of Quantum Computing, with Alice & Bob and Hyperion Research

The state of quantum is full of promise and in a constant flux, so much so that it’s hard to keep track of. In this webinar, we have Julliette Peyronnet of French quantum company Alice & Bob and Bob Sorensen of industry analyst firm Hyperion Research examining the latest developments in quantum technology and also how organizations can prepare .... - Read more from Inside HPC & AI News.

Inside HPC & AI News | High-Performance Computing & Artificial Intelligencestaff

Closer to current reality, Next Platform had an interesting take on Intel

Fixing Intel Foundry Is Like Stopping Tripping Down The Stairs

Technical debt is a real thing, as any IT manager, programmer, system administrator or SRE, or end user will tell you. If you save money in the short run

The Next PlatformTimothy Prickett Morgan

From HMx Labs

HPC Club #5: Book your place now.

HPC Club #5

Reservations for the next HPC Club in London are now open.

Flux by HMx LabsHamza

Cloud VMs that are faster than bare metal? Yea right! No really… its true

Magical Cloud VMs

Can running HPC on the cloud actually result in higher performance than bare metal on prem? Turns out it can!

Flux by HMx LabsHamza

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