@HPC Podcast Archives - OrionX.net - HPC News Bytes – 20240129

Episode Date: January 29, 2024

- Italy's Eni Acquiring 600 PFLOPS System - Intel's Advanced Fab in New Mexico, UMC partnership - NSF's Advanced Computing National AI Research Resource Pilot - D-Wave's 1,200+ Qubit Advantage2 Prototype - IonQ's 35 algorithmic qubit system [audio mp3="https://orionx.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/HPCNB_20240129.mp3"][/audio] The post HPC News Bytes – 20240129 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. Hey, everyone. Welcome to HPC News Bites. I'm Doug Black. Hi, Shaheen. Why don't we start off with Italian energy giant Eni, E-N-I, is acquiring a monster 600-petaflop supercomputer from HPE Cray, powered by AMD EPYC CPUs and nearly 14,000 AMD MI250X GPU accelerators.

The system would rank number three on the top 500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers, and we also note that the system's peak performance is rated at six-tenths of an exaflops, easily the most powerful system used for commercial industrial purposes. It's quite a sale for HPE, which also announced, by the way, that company veteran Neil MacDonald will add the HPC AI business units to his existing responsibilities running the compute business. McDonald takes on the role recently vacated by Justin Hotard, who left HPE for Intel. Yeah, Eni is a so-called super major energy company, but highly diversified with something like 100 billion euros in revenues. It's typically been a top industrial commercial system on the top 500. Their HPC4 system, also from HPE, and HPC5 from Dell, both featured prominently. HPC5 tripled

the performance to 51.7 petaflops. So this HPC6 is a nice more than 10x improvement. Eni uses these for all kinds of simulations in oil and gas and even fusion energy. They also work with and have invested in the French quantum computing company Pascal with a Q, which is pursuing the neutral atom mortality and raised $100 million in Series B round about a year ago. Also interesting that they are going with the MI250X chip from AMD like the Frontier and Lumi systems do, and not the later model MI300.

Okay, and sticking with chips, Intel opened its Fab9 advanced chip factory in Rio Rancho, New Mexico. Part of Intel's previously announced $3.5 billion investment in that state's operations for manufacturing advanced semiconductor packaging. This includes Intel's multi-chip 3D technology, Favaros. Yes, as always, we should remember that Intel is really two companies, and Intel, the fab company, is the critical part of geopolitics of semiconductors. There's another piece of good news in that vein, coming after news that they are accelerating their A18 fab to the second half of 2024. Chip packaging is where the bottleneck has been in recent times, presumably what's behind long wait times for high-end GPUs. So this New Mexico fab will be mass-producing Intel's 3D advanced packaging. Separately, Intel Foundry Systems teamed up with UMC,

United Microelectronics, a Taiwanese company, to fill a gap in its 12 nanometer parts where a lot of industrial demand is and where the processes need to follow industry standards versus internal to Intel. It's a pretty smart way to address that need. The National Science Foundation and 10 other federal agencies and 25 private sector and nonprofit organizations came together to launch a pilot program for what is called the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource. Right now, it looks like a clearinghouse that connects researchers to data and system resources, but eventually wants to be a shared research infrastructure for AI discovery and innovation. Yeah, the folks at Oak Ridge Lab contacted me to be sure to include in our coverage that DOE will extend operations for the Summit

supercomputer, still ranked number seven on the top 500 list, but which had been scheduled for decommissioning at the end of last year, and now will be extended through this coming October. Shaheen, this whole thing has echoes of the next-gen integrated research infrastructure that senior HPC strategists at the National Labs have been talking about since the summer of 2022. Definitely a great effort there. And also interesting that Summit, so many years after its introduction, is still on

the top 10. It's about to retire. Yes, indeed. So as has become expected on our weekly update, there's more quantum computing news. D-Wave, the original quantum computing company out of the West Coast of Canada, already has a 5,000 qubit quantum annealing system, one of which has been installed at the Juhlik Center in Germany. For its next generation system called Advantage 2, it's been pursuing newer technology, a superconducting multi-layer integrated circuit that reduces noise. D-Wave said it has a prototype with this new technology that it has calibrated to 1200 plus qubits and will make it available on its cloud service when it's ready. And meanwhile, IonQ announced it hit its target technical milestone of 35 algorithmic qubits a year ahead of schedule.

The company said this milestone was achieved on IonQ Forte and leveraged the high-fidelity trapped Ion qubits and all-to-all connected architecture. Also, I have to mention that our latest At HPC podcast conversation with Dr. Travis Humble is an excellent way to catch up on the state of quantum science and technology. He is spearheading quantum research at the Department of Energy, and he helps edit several technical publications.

And most of all, he has a very good way of discussing quantum issues in an accessible way. I encourage everyone to check it out. All right, that's it. Thanks for joining us. 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.