The SC #133

If you’ve gone single vendor for your new supercomputer and are worried about how well the CPU section of your new machine with hold up with Nvidia’s Vera you can relax. Phoronix got hold of a couple of the new 88 core ARM CPUs and the initial suspicions about them hold up. They are rather impressive. Phoronix have run OpenFOAM and QuantLib benchmarks (plus a few others) and while it’s not a clean sweep, better across the board, I certainly wouldn’t be worried about running an Nvidia only stack from a performance perspective right now.

Of course, benchmark results on their own aren’t everything, it would be interesting to see how the Vera CPUs compare both when cost adjusted and for real world workloads but so far this looks quite promising. I am curious though how hard adoption will be for users. Moving to ARM isn’t always trivial especially when large parts of your workload still depend on 30 year old code compiled for Intel x86 and still run 32bit binaries 😁.

Nvidia gave us something else interesting this week too in the form of AICR v1.0, or AI Cluster Runtime to give it its full name. The idea here being to provide a mechanism to manage known good version combinations of GPU drivers, Kubernetes versions and every other part of the stack needed to go from racked hardware to working AI factory. It’s a nice idea and one that I’ve been approached with by other startups. Nvidia’s solution looks to be a little less comprehensive and of course is Nvidia specific but if you’re already running an Nvidia only stack and finding you’re battling broken clusters from version upgrade it might be worth a look. 

And if you’re looking for tips on improving reliability for your AI inferencing workloads then the piece from HPC Wire this week sharing some tips and how its distinct from cloud SaaS applications might be relevant.

I’ve talked a fair bit about compute markets in the last couple of weeks and HPC Wire put out an interesting but rather frustrating story with news of a National Compute Grid. This seems to address so many of my complaints about lack of deliverability and genuine utility for users. But it’s so lacking in detail as to be almost useless. I’m not even sure who’s running this and in which country (though I’ll assume it’s the USA) or how much compute they have or how its interconnected or what scheduler is used or… and breath… anyway, it sounds promising.

Upscale AI provided a bit more detail last week on Skyhammer, their vendor neutral scale out networking. We’ve consistently failed at this so far as an industry but it would be great to see something succeed here rather than being locked in to NVLink.

Lastly, its HPC Club this week and rather unusually we still have some spaces left this time so if you’d like to come along and nerd out about HPC with like-minded people with no one trying to sell you anything, come along.

All the News in Depth

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

Vera CPU seems to perform quite well. We don’t have any COREx benchmarks but Phoronix did run the QuantLib test cases and it seems to hold up in those.

An open source high speed network interconnect? Sounds promising… 

A couple of weeks ago I spoke to a stealth startup that was working on a way to configure AI Factory clusters easily. It looked interesting. I think Nvidia might take a bit of the wind out of their sails though (fortunately for them they can do much more)

This frustrates me due how little detail is actually provided but the idea sounds promising given everything I recently said about the lack of physical delivery in compute markets.

Looking at SRE for AI clusters and where it differes from cloud SaaS

HMx Labs Updates

HPC Club is this week! Shocking we have some spaces left still. If you’re interested come along

HPC Club: Multi Cloud Software Defined Supercomputing

Booking is now live for the next HPC Club event. Oct 14, Tower Bridge, London.

Flux by HMx LabsHamza

Off Topic

If you ignore everything, listen to this. Available everywhere else you get your podcasts too. Rick Rubin on AI

I’ve been thinking a lot about the impact of AI on art and how that compares and relates to its impact on software. I have a lot of thoughts I need to organise but I will share them soon. In the mean time, listen to Rick. Ignore the click bait headline about Jay Z. This is interesting for his takes on AI, indefensibility (which I refer to as making things unreasonably good but agree with) and life.

But also AI is making you basic. I knew it would turn everything beige (AI Predictions for 2025, March to Homogeneity & Mediocrity) but maybe didn’t think it would homogenise all humans too (just their output). 

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