@HPC Podcast Archives - OrionX.net - HPC News Bytes – 20231120

Episode Date: November 20, 2023

- SC23 stats - Exascale update and future - Raft of new chips - Quantum Village at SC23 - UCIe, PCIe, Ultra Ethernet [audio mp3="https://orionx.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/HPCNB_20231120.mp3"][/audio] The post HPC News Bytes – 20231120 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. This is Shaheen Khan. Doug is recovering from a cold. We were both at the Supercomputing Conference last week. As of Tuesday, November 14th, the show had 14,001 registered attendees and 438 exhibitors. Scinet, the show's wide area network, would rate at 6.7 terabits per second using about 67,000 feet of fiber. Someone did the math and figured you could download all of Netflix movies in about an hour. Not so bad.

HPC as a discipline is bound to become more mainstream, and the show's tagline, I am HPC, captured that very well. What you see at AC is everything, and we need several hours to cover it, but here are a few highlights. There's growing confidence to build exascale class systems, and we need many. There's a growing number of 500 plus petaflop machines, notably the newly announced systems at ULIC and Bristol, not to mention Microsoft's admirable showing on the top 500. There are three items to watch here.

One is enabling AI and then using AI to help with programming and managing these complex systems. Second is integration, which will be a critical capability to incorporate technologies like quantum computing, to use instruments that are themselves turning into mini supercomputers, and to include devices and systems outside of data centers. And thirdly is power and cooling, which must become a lot more efficient. Liquid cooling was very present at SC23 in exhibits and in various talks. There was lots of news on AI, with a focus on generative AI and large language models, and also inference. Microsoft, which had its own event last week, introduced their second ARM-based CPU called Cobalt 100 and an AI accelerator called Maya 100. This is similar to AWS with the Graviton CPU and their Tranium and Inferentia accelerators and Google's TPU. Interestingly, Microsoft also pushed forward

with AMD and NVIDIA as they try to diversify their offerings. Meanwhile, AMD introduced the MI300A APU and MI300X GPU, and NVIDIA's new roadmap has a raft of new chips, H200, GH200, B100, X100, etc. And Intel touted Gaudi 3 and Falcon Shores. There was also really impressive announcements and benchmarks by Cerebra Systems, Grok, Samba Nova, and Ontheter, among others. It's a confusing scene, and that creates a good market opportunity for vendors who are able to test drive these chips and advise customers. SC23 had a very nice quantum village featuring a number of quantum infrastructure, hardware, and software players. 2023 has been the year of working under the hood in quantum computing with lots of progress that is

not so visible. Neutral atom and photonics have made great strides while trapped ion and superconducting systems are further along the journey from the lab to a real product. To list the vendors you should track, for neutral atoms we have Quera, Q-Era, ColdQuanta, Atom Computing, and Pascal with a Q. And for photonics, we have Orca, Xanadu, Quandela, Quix, Tundra, and PsiQuantum. The power efficiency of quantum computing is a big advantage that we need to remember, even with the big refrigeration that some of them need. Last item to mention is interconnects. UCIe for chiplets, PCIe and CXL for racks, and ultra-ethernet alliance across the data center

seems to be the trend over the next few years. PCIe is moving fast after a slow transition from PCIe 3 to 4. It has blazed through 5 and 6, and 7 is coming soon. There was a big exhibit at SC23 dedicated to open standards, as has been the case in previous years. It's always a must visit, and it covered these and some more. All right, that's it for this episode.

Thank you all for being with us, and look forward to having Doug back next week. Take care. HPC Newsbytes is a production of OrionX thank you all for being with us and look forward to having Doug back next week. Take care.