By Hamza in Quantum Weekly — Dec 29, 2025

Quantum #92

Issue #92 of the weekly HPC newsletter by HMx Labs. Tumbleweeds this week but also IBM gives us ARM binaries for Symphony and you’re almost out of time for HPSF Con’s call for proposals.

I almost didn’t bother writing this week’s HPC news because there simply isn’t very much of it. Even the Cloud release notes section is just tumbleweed blowing across the desert.

But there are a couple of things worthy of discussion. First up, the timing is weird, but IBM have finally made Symphony available on ARM processors. 🎉 Well, more specifically they have made it available on Graviton. For an additional annual subscription. Above what you already pay for your Symphony license. That gap between AMD and Graviton machines on AWS for financial risk workloads was already pretty tight… I’d run some numbers before splurging.

More importantly though, this means that there does indeed exist a version of the Symphony binaries that run on ARM CPUs. How much you have to pay and where you run them is just a matter of how hard you can twist your IBM sales rep’s arm right? 😁

If the lack of availability of your scheduler on ARM is what was holding you back, that excuse just vapourised. Time to start working on your quant libraries and battling the beast of numerical stability.

Unless you’re using DataSynapse GridServer of course. In which we need to have a much longer conversation!

Secondly, and I think I have been a little remiss by not having covered this already, but HPSF Con is coming up, and they still have an open call for proposals. If you’d like to give a presentation you have about a week or so before that window closes. Honestly, I would have liked to… but I suspect I won’t make it past ICE, so I’ll be staying right here.