@HPC Podcast Archives - OrionX.net - HPC News Bytes – 20240513

Episode Date: May 13, 2024

- ISC24 conference begins today - Substantial investments in Quantum Tech continue - Geopolitics of chips and scenario planning around TSMC, again - Electricity shortage and grid capacity for AI datacenters [audio mp3="https://orionx.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/HPCNB_20240513.mp3"][/audio] The post HPC News Bytes – 20240513 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. This week, actually today, ISC starts up, ISC24 in Hamburg, and the conference will be at the center of the HPC AI world with thousands of attendees, hundreds of exhibitors, and as many hours of sessions and presentations.

For guidance on how attendees can use their time, you might try the video panel discussion posted on Inside HPC that I did with three industry luminaries last week. Also, our most recent podcast guest, John Schauf of Berkeley Lab and last year's ISC program chair, will be part of an ISC keynote presentation Wednesday night on the future of supercomputing. Yeah, as you know, I'm usually in front of the line to see the new release of the top 500 list that comes out later today. I also look forward to catching up with the state of supercomputing in Europe and industrial policy in support of what I call technopolitics as the driver of national competitiveness and geopolitics. There's hopefully more presence by Chinese organizations

at ISC, and that could provide new information. Other topics of interest are DPU chips and how they are used in big systems, especially by hyperscalers, NVIDIA, and HPE, who have their own, and various startups. Also, AI at the edge, CXL and memory-centric architectures, and advances in quantum computing. Speaking of quantum computing, serious money has been poured into the development of that technology. Despite few actual systems out there and none that is ready for production, governments continue to pour money into it. That makes sense, since quantum technologies spearhead an entire ecosystem that boosts

competitiveness. A new strategy was seen when the Australian government put 620 million US dollars in PsyQuantum, a Silicon Valley startup to align it and bring it back home to Australia, essentially. PsyQuantum was co-founded by Australians and will now establish a regional headquarters in Australia and build its first utility-scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer near Brisbane Airport. It aims to be operational by the end of 2027. In a more traditional move, the U.S. Department of Energy announced a funding opportunity of between $60 and $70 million for quantum information science research. But that's pocket change compared to news reports

coming out of Illinois, right, Doug? Yeah, there are multiple news stories of a, quote, quantum Manhattan project in Chicago receiving $20 billion, that's billion with a B, from the Illinois state government. According to a story in the Quantum Insider, the $20 billion figure refers to the potential for future business and government investments, as well as job creation. SciQuantum figures in this story as well. According to Crane's Chicago Business, the project would be located on a 150-acre campus anchored by SciQuantum. Chicago already is something of a quantum R&D hub, including the Chicago Quantum Exchange, whose members include Argonne National Lab, the University of Chicago, Purdue, and the University of Illinois. We have two related stories coming on a theme we frequently

discuss here, the critical position of advanced chips in today's geopolitics. It was in part a response to growing U.S.-China tensions that the U.S. passed the Chips and Science Act to help fund the expansion of U.S. chip manufacturing capacity, which increasingly has been outsourced to Taiwan and South Korea. The latest news related to the Chips Act comes from the Department of Commerce, which announced a $285 million funding opportunity for a digital twin and semiconductor chips manufacturing institute to be used for development of advanced packaging, assembly, and test processes. Related to this is Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo's appearance before a recent congressional hearing, where a question was posed about the impact of a hypothetical Chinese invasion of Taiwan and seizure of TSMC. While few people

see that as anything other than a theoretical scenario planning exercise, it nevertheless is a scenario. She said an invasion would be, quote, absolutely devastating, end quote, for the United States. To provide some perspective here, fully 92% of advanced chips used by the US are made by TSMC, and a third of the world's commerce travels through the South China Sea. As we've discussed here, countries around the world are responding by building out chip manufacturing capacity, and such scenarios can be used to accelerate those efforts. If you have a taste for more potentially alarming news, we can talk about electricity shortage for data centers.

The CEO of Digital Bridge, a digital infrastructure company, said during a recent earnings call that data centers will run out of electrical power in two years. He said, quote, if you think about how much power remains on the U.S. grid, we're down to less than 7 gigawatts. We're probably down to less than 2.8 to 3 gigawatts in Europe, end quote. Lest you think generating more power will fix things, there's also a problem of transmission and distribution, i.e. the grid itself as a choke point. Perhaps more justification for those small modular reactors? Yeah, of course, exploding demand for data center power

can be attributed to a great degree to adoption of AI throughout the global economy. Shaheen, let's hope the CEO's general predictions are overly pessimistic. All right. So on those alarming notes,

that's it for this episode. Thank you all for being with us. HPC Newsbytes 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.