The SC #128

The most classical supercomputing aligned news (even if it is for an AI system technically) from last week must be the selection by EuroHPC of an AMD based supercomputer for the replacement of LUMI. AMD has dominated the Top500 for some time now and seems to be cementing that lead even for AI capable systems. At least for those that are owned or operated by classical HPC/ supercomputing institutions. Maybe FP64 is kinda important after all huh. Who would have guessed 😁 Especially if you’re running converged classical and AI workloads.

CERN moved to Debian (from RHEL)! Before we start the distro wars again (probably coupled with AI ideologies) the details here are important and make this a fairly boring and eminently practical and sensible decision. The move is specifically for its computes that act as controllers. The upgrade cycle is around 15 years. 3 year LTS releases can stay at home! Combine this with RHEL9 dropping support for anything below x86-64-v2 and RHEL10 x86-64-v3. Many of the control boards at CERN don’t meet that requirement and it's far simpler to just use a distro that will support them rather than upgrade a lot of very bespoke hardware. Put your pitchforks away please.

In other Linux related news, Amazon Linux 2027 preview was released last week and early testing of the 7.3 kernel show improved performance on AMD EPYC CPUs for certain types of workloads. So that’s good news.

IBM also released its latest quantum chip, Nighthawk. Lots of impressive sounding improvements there but still relatively little in terms of what I can actually do with it back herein the real world.  We haven’t forgotten about this either and are still plugging away on our little side quest to see how viable it is to run financial risk analytics (MC based at least) on a quantum machine.

Azure delivered another little mini gem in the form of a public preview of its multicloud interconnect. No doubt driven by regulatory concerns around concentration risk and the subsequent demands from its customers, but it does mean we are slowly creeping into a a multicloud world.  Just need to do something about those pesky egress costs 😉

Have a good week y’all.

All the News in Depth

Cloud and vendor releases for Supercomputing & HPC (and AI too if you change the filters)

EuroHPC Goes AMD for its AI Supercomputer. AMD Press Release.

CERN moves to Debian! Or watch the presentation here.

IBM releases Nighthawk, its latest Quantum computer. HPC Wire has a more in depth explanation.

Multicloud compute is slowly getting more and more real (Azure)

HMx Labs Updates

If you didn’t guess already, HPC NErD was a CERN last week.

I’ll have to go digging in my camera SD cards to see if I can find another little puzzle for later this week.

Off Topic

Nothing to see here, just capitalism doing what capitalism done when no one is around to regulate. Gotta keep that bubble inflated.

Well of course I was going to include this one… its finance folks talking tech (or about that at least)

Fireship somehow manages to sound anti AI while still making the AI thing sound pretty far out. I mean, I thought it was pretty cool.

Fortunately, Cal Newport has a pretty down to earth take on things which had me back to thinking, meh, it’s just LLM stuff.

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