@HPC Podcast Archives - OrionX.net - HPC News Bytes – 20240108

Episode Date: January 8, 2024

- Intel-4 fab, IDM 2.0, Ericsson - CXL, Samsung, Red Hat - AI startup funding - Quantum Key Distribution landscape [audio mp3="https://orionx.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/HPCNB_20240108.mp3"][/audio] The post HPC News Bytes – 20240108 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. Hi, everyone. Welcome to HPC News Bites. I'm Doug Black. Hi, Shaheen. We start this episode with news that has a bit of irony to it. Tom's Hardware reported that Ericsson, which makes networking

and 5G chips and is arguably Intel's biggest foundry customer, is using the Intel 4 process node. The irony here is it appears Ericsson is beating Intel to market ahead of Intel's own Meteor Lake CPU tile, also to be built on the Intel 4 process. The publication said, this is a good sign for Intel's IDM 2.0 strategy, IDM standing for Integrated Device Manufacturing, announced by Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger nearly three years ago. We also note, by the way, that Intel announced the appointment of Justin Hotard, who comes over from HPE to run Intel's data center and AI group. In 2022, Trish Dankroger left Intel to become HPE's chief product officer for HPC and AI. Yeah, very interesting. The Ericsson chip is great news for Intel, the fab company, which needs to attract customers while also serving Intel,

the chip company. So in that context, Intel must demonstrate that it treats everyone equally. And what better example than this? The message really is you too can have priority access to our latest tech, and that should attract customers. This is also an endorsement of Intel's strategy to rebuild its manufacturing prowess, and really the CHIPS and Science Act II, the U.S. government effort to accelerate leadership in this area. In another turn of the knob for CXL, an important emerging technology for interconnects, Samsung said that it has optimized its CXL memory for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.3 and Red Hat's KVM and Podman environments. It has verified memory operations like recognition, read-write operations, etc.

CXL, of course, is a unified interface standard enabling connections between different processors, including CPUs, GPUs, and memory devices through a PCIe interface, and thus it is a keystone technology for heterogeneous computing. The two companies first signed a Memorandum of Understanding in 2022. On the venture front, investors poured money into AI in 2023 in an otherwise dismal landscape for the venture capital industry. According to Crunchbase data, startup funding in 2023 was the lowest in five years globally. It peaked in 2021 at nearly $700 billion, dropped to $462 billion in 2022, and last year took another 38% dive to $285 billion. Yeah, investors go where the action is, and AI is the party. Everyone wants to crash.

And it shows in the numbers from Crunchbase. Global funding to AI startups was around $50 billion last year. This was up 9% from the 45.8 billion in 2022. The largest fundings in 2023 went to foundation model companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Inflection. Between the three of them, they raised $18 billion, about a third of the total in 2023. Now in the quantum field, we've heard for years about the alarming possibilities of quantum computers breaking system security barriers for individuals, companies, and countries. In fact, a senior IT strategist recently told me that in the quantum R&D race between the US and China, it's a matter of, quote,

who shuts down who first. But now we're hearing about research being done to make systems more secure from quantum attacks of the future. There's a new paper published by the German Federal Office of Information Security, BSI, about quantum key distribution. Yeah, it's really a very good report. Now, the end-to-end picture for data security is really vast, starting with trusted factories at one end and extending somewhere beyond ephemeral infrastructure at the other. The heart of it, however, is cryptographic keys and algorithms for encryption and decryption.

Quantum technology, not necessarily quantum computing, can help with better quality keys and more secure ways to transmit them. This latter is referred to as quantum key exchange, QKE, or quantum key distribution, QKD. That process itself needs to be airtight, and this paper analyzes tens of studies, identifies a few dozen attack vectors, and classifies them according to difficulty. Really good work. All right, that's it for this episode. Thank you all for being with us. HPC Newsbytes is a production of OrionX in association with InsideHPC.

Shaheen Khan and Doug Black host the show. Every episode is featured on InsideHPC.com and posted on OrionX.net. Thank you for listening.