Quantum #95
Aliens, sovereign clouds and vibe coding all feature this week in your HPC newsletter. Issue #95 for your reading pleasure.
This week saw the launch of the first EU sovereign cloud. Before you rush to throw all your sensitive data into there on the assumption that it is now safe from the prying eyes of the three letter agencies on the other side of the Atlantic I’d like to remind you that it is in fact still owned by AWS and still subject to the US CLOUD ACT as confirmed by Microsoft in June last year. Suddenly your CSO’s insistence on bring your own key for cloud encryption doesn’t sound quite so pointless anymore huh.
SETI haven’t found aliens yet, but they did recruit 2million users across which they distributed compute. I don’t know if that’s largest (at least it terms of number of nodes and probably geographical distribution) “supercomputer”, but it must be pretty close to the top if it’s not! HPC Wire took a closer look, but lack all of the details I would have loved to see about the SETI@home project.
If you’re not already aware, vibe coding, or really, more accurately, AI first coding as there is human in the loop and that human is generally a software development professional, is becoming rather capable. We’ve got some plans around experimenting with this to see how capable it really is in domains such as HPC. More details on that below but I think there’s a more interesting conversation to be had immediately. I have spent much of my career migrating HPC systems off home grown schedulers to well established, feature rich and commercially supported products. Are we about to see that direction change? If we are even partly successful in our little experiment of creating a new HPC scheduler, does that pave the way for banks, pharmaceutical companies and chip designers to write their own too? Are we headed to a world where integrating a third party product might take as long if not longer than just AI first coding your own that fits your own particular needs?
In The News
Updates from the big three clouds on all things HPC including the AWS EU sov cloud announcement
It’s a little late… not only for a 2025 roundup but also for reflections on SC25… but it’s kinda interesting anyway
Doug Black
A little look at the history of SETI@home. Despite the headline it doesn’t delve into the @home part nearly as much as I would have liked.
From HMx Labs
Vibe coding? In HPC? Yea right…. No really. Let’s see how much game Claude Code really has?
Not an area I usually venture into, but having spoken to many people and conducted a silly number of interviews over the last few weeks here are a few tips
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