Quantum #85

Not one, not two but three new cloud VMs last week and one of them is even of the dedicated HPC variety! Ok sure, Google also made some incredulous claims about Axion being 2x cheaper with a sneaky little “up to” doing the heavy lifting in that sentence. Given I literally just drew a chart this weekend for my presentation at Quant Minds that showed an x86 processer being more cost effective than Axion I did wonder what test conditions are required for that 2x saving. But still! 3 new VM types!

The new Azure HBv5 is still Zen 4 based which was a little disappointing to be honest but we’ll plug it into Cloudbench and see how it holds up as it does have some fairly impressive stats and benchmark results on Microsoft’s release blog.

One week to go to SC25! Unfortunately, I won’t be there (and I promise this won’t be like ISC25 where I ended up going last minute!) anyone willing to bring me back some swag? I’ll swap it with you for HPC Club merch 😉

Speaking of HPC Club, that’s not too far off now either, 26^th November to be precise. A few spots still left if you’re thinking of coming along to the unofficial SC debrief.  

CPUs GPUs APUs and all the rest - HPC CLUB

HPC Club event on CPUs, GPUs and silicon diversity. Join us for an evening of discussion and networking with industry experts. 26 November 2025 @ 17:00, Canary Wharf, London.

HPC CLUB

In The News

Updates from the big three clouds on all things HPC including the aforementioned new VMs

HPC Cloud Updates WE 09 Nov 2025

Updates to AWS, Azure & GCP in the last week relevant for HPC practitioners. Memory optimized VMs from both Azure and AWS in the form of the HPC specific HBv5 on Azure and the R8a on AWS. Google gives us new TPUs and Axion powered VMs too.

Flux by HMx LabsHamza

Oak Ridge teams up with a bevy of big tech to figure out how to get Quantum working in HPC. Am I the only one that’s still sceptical that quantum computing can do anything useful anytime soon?

Oak Ridge, NVIDIA, HPE Team to Integrate Quantum, AI and HPC for Science

The Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, NVIDIA and HPE will seek to open insights into quantum computing and identify strategies .... - Read more from Inside HPC & AI News.

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

DARPA updated its quantum benchmarking initiative

https://www.hpcwire.com/2025/11/07/darpa-selects-11-participants-for-quantum-benchmarking-initiative-stage-b/

Not a lot more that really caught my eye and didn’t read like a regurgitated press release or worse paid for content… ah well.

From HMx Labs

Got any questions you’d like to put to Nvidia (and maybe others) at HPC Club?

HPC Club CPUs/GPUs: Call for Questions

Got a question you’d like answered about CPUs/GPUs/APUs in HPC? Want to put it forward for the next HPC Club?

Flux by HMx LabsHamza

Compute utilisation… the target isn’t always 100%

Compute Utilisation: Not what you think it means

A brief guide to understanding what utilisation in compute clusters means and how this relates to your code, supercomputers and cloud providers.

Flux by HMx LabsHamza

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