@HPC Podcast Archives - OrionX.net - HPC News Bytes – 20231009

Episode Date: October 9, 2023

- 1st Exascale Supercomputer in Europe - Hyperion Rseaech Survey on the use of LLMs in HPC - AD Little report on Quantum Computing myths and opportunities - Human Immortality in 2030 [audio mp3="https://orionx.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/HPCNB_20231009.mp3"][/audio] The post HPC News Bytes – 20231009 appeared first on OrionX.net.

Welcome to HPC News Bites, a weekly show about important news in the world of supercomputing, AI, and other advanced technologies. Welcome to HPC News Bites. I'm Doug Black. Hey, Shaheen. Big news this week is Europe will be getting its first exascale system to be installed at the ULIC Supercomputing Center. It will be composed of two partitions, a GPU accelerator booster module powered by NVIDIA GPUs, and a general

purpose cluster module based on SciPro Ray 1, the HPC dedicated European processor. Of note, is that this gets NVIDIA into the exascale arena. AMD and Intel chips power the first three US-based exascale systems. That's right. Also a new win for ARM, also because of SciPeryl. I'm not surprised it's in ULIC, which has been a major site with different modes of supercomputing, including quantum computers, and it is in Germany that helps. The system is scheduled for 2024 installation, so next year. Industry analyst firm Hyperion Research came out with a survey on the use of large language models in HPC. This is part of the overall impact of AI on HPC. I think of AI as new HPC algorithms

and libraries that will be used in all kinds of places. And this points to that. Yeah, the survey shows the intense interest in LLMs in the HPC community. The vast majority of survey respondents are currently adopting LLMs within their HPC organizations or plan to within the next 12 to 18 months. Hyperion also forecasts that the purchase of AI systems of all types, not just LLMs, will grow at over 30% a year out through 2027. There was an article by consulting firm A.D. Little on quantum computing, and it caught my eye because of its unusually straightforward way of talking about quantum. The paper doesn't try to force us to understand how quantum works. It focuses really on bursting some myths and they would say misperceptions that have arisen around quantum and offers practical advice. The analysts tell us that quantum in some ways is closer to happening

than we might think. And they advise organizations to start getting ready for quantum now. So they talk about quantum computing, as you mentioned, but they don't even try to explain it beyond bits and qubits, which is really a good move because right now there is a need to address what I call the voodoo factor in quantum computing. That sort of explanation is still needed, but the paper does a good job of classifying issues and opportunities. So we all know the serious

impact of HPC on humanity, but few of us talk about human immortality as a result of HPC. Well, here it comes. Some years ago, I heard and loved the quote, if you live to the year 2030, you can live forever. And I have repeated it since. I heard it from Sri Ambati, an old colleague who is CEO of AI company H2O. This week, there's news that Ray Kurzweil, who has a decent record of predicting things, is setting 2030 as the date humans will achieve immortality. You have to remember the other saying in the Valley, the future is already here, but it's not uniformly distributed. So making all this progress accessible and at the service of all humans is another big issue. Yeah. And I've also heard the future ain't what it used to be. But in any case, I guess the idea is that we just need to write out the next seven years for our chance at living forever. Kurzweil says, 2029 is the date when AI will pass a valid Turing test and therefore

achieve human levels of intelligence. And, quote, I have set 2045 for the singularity, which is when we will multiply our effective intelligence a billion fold by merging with the intelligence we have created, as told to the publication Futurism. In terms of immortality, Kurzweil is saying by 2030, we will be able to advance human life expectancy by more than a year every year. And part of this, which in itself is progress toward the singularity 15 years later, we'll see nanobots flowing through our bloodstream, making repairs and linking our brain up to the cloud. When this happens, we will be able to send videos or emails if you want to think about the more dull aspects of being a cyborg directly from our brains, as well as backing up

our memories. So we'll look forward to that day. Okay, that's it. Lots of stuff, and we'll talk to you all soon. HPC News Bites is a production of OrionX in association with Inside HPC. Shaheen Khan and Doug Black host the show. Every episode is featured on InsideHPC.com and posted on OrionX.net. Thank you for listening.