The SC #132
Issue #132 of The SC. Weekly supercomputing news Updates on rack scale systems from Nvidia and AMD. AWS and Azure retire a bunch of stuff, some of which might actually need you to do some work to stop using. CERN tries out some very interesting new tech promising 2000x speed up.
There was some really interesting stuff this week but first let’s get the headline grabbing boring stuff out the way.
Nvidia’s Vera Rubin seems to have finally gone from coming soon to actually in use. And not just by someone running a couple of benchmarks. A real Bonafide customer. Though neither CoreWeave (who are running it) nor Nvidia seem to be saying quite how many they have up and running. I’m going to be charitable and assume that we have at least a full NVL72 if not a few of them.
Of course, AMD can’t let that happen without also making some noise about Helios, their rack scale alternative, and sure enough HPE announced its buying about $1.2billion worth of them.
Before we get to the interesting new stuff, time to wave goodbye to some old stuff. Both AWS and Azure were busy sunsetting things last week, some of which might take you a minute to deal with. AWS Research and Engineering Studio will no longer be officially supported. It’s not going anywhere in a hurry, if you have it running it will stick around but if it goes wrong, don’t expect any help from your friendly AWS solution architect & friends. Amazon’s recommendation, naturally, is to move to Parallel Compute Service.
Microsoft are putting HPC Pack out to pasture too (I swear they announced this a couple of weeks back too but maybe I’m imagining it). Microsoft, of course, would like you to move to Azure Cycle Cloud Workspace for Slurm or whatever insane name they have for that this week.
If you’d like to explore your options for alternative schedulers though, you can start off with our scheduler selection tool. At least narrow down the short list a bit first to see what your options are.
Ok, interesting stuff! CERN have decided to include Signaloid in their openlab heterogenous architectures test bed. I’d never heard of Signaloid but CERN does some incredibly cool stuff and if they figured its worth a look, its definitely worth a look. The claims are impressive to say the least. I can’t say I understand what exactly it does or how it works any more than before I started reading their web site but 2000x speed ups for Monte Carlo based calculations? This needs further investigation! I mean quantum computing can carry on taking its sweet time if this stuff works! Guess I’ve just found yet more toys to try and play with.
We’ve been busy at HMx towers last week too, Sahana has put together a few words on concentration risk, you know that thing your favourite regulator keeps asking you about. Combine that with a little bit about multi cloud and you’ve probably got just enough information to start wondering how to deal with this stuff. Which probably means you want to come along to HPC Club to have a chat with some other HPC nerds about it. Which bodes well as we have a few spots left still. I wouldn’t hang about to book your place though!
All the News in Depth
Cloud and vendor releases for Supercomputing & HPC (and AI too if you change the filters) including all the VMs deprecated on Azure. Oh if you're wondering where all the Google release notes were for the last few weeks, I think that should be fixed now!
Both AWS and Microsoft Azure have decided you need to upgrade your HPC stack by announcing the retirement of AWS Research and Engineering Studio and Microsoft HPC Pack.
More detail from Signaloid here, but honestly it didn’t clarify much for me. Very tempted to just try this out on some option pricing.
HMx Labs Updates
Making the most of the cloud? Its elastic you know... and you can use lots of them
Small number of tickets still left for HPC Club
Off Topic
Will Quantum computing ever work? Hmmm
AWS wanting to shift its GPUs into an SPV is pretty interesting. I don’t necessarily agree with the conclusions of this YouTuber… I could equally well argue that this actually proves Nvidia’s point and that GPUs are becoming an investable asset class and AWS is taking advantage of that. Oh also he’s wrong about an asset having to be appreciating.
Mo Bitar has either been bought, is suffering from AI psychosis, or he’s just right… maybe I need to dig out HAL and see if Opus 5.5 can do any better than 4.6 did earlier this year in trying to create a new HPC data plane and scheduler
Know someone else who might like to read this newsletter? Forward this on to them or even better, ask them to sign up here: https://cloudhpc.news
