@HPC Podcast Archives - OrionX.net - HPC News Bytes – 20240819

Episode Date: August 19, 2024

- AI-centric servers form new market segment - NIST announcement heralds Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC) milestone - English Professors win NSF grant to study supercomputing's impact on society, geopolitics [audio mp3="https://orionx.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/HPCNB_20240819.mp3"][/audio] The post HPC News Bytes – 20240819 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 of Inside HPC, and with me is Shaheen Khan of OrionX.net. We'll start with an announcement from HPC industry analyst firm Hyperion Research that they've broadened their HPC market sizing parameters to include what they're calling AI centric servers made by quote non-traditional HPC suppliers. And that includes NVIDIA,

Cerebrus, Samba Nova, and Supermicro. This has increased the overall HPC market by 36.7% for 2023 and is projected to add $13.6 billion by 2028. Shaheen, for most of us, I think we already include hardware from NVIDIA, Cerebrus, etc. as part of the HPC AI universe, wouldn't you say? Yes, we do. As long as they put AI on their HPC, I'm okay, personally, as we all know. But it is good to see formal taxonomies emerge as a consistent part of market analysts' models. This change has increased the HPC server market number for 2023 to $20 billion. That was a post view. And Hyperion says it will reach $40 billion by 2028. But we should wait and see, since that Goldman Sachs report that we covered a few weeks ago

projected something like $210 billion worth of servers just in 2025 and just for NVIDIA. So the growth might just be a lot more explosive than that. Post-quantum cryptography, PQC, passed a big milestone this week when the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST, formally released three new algorithms. Cryptography relies on asymmetric or trapdoor functions, where going in one direction is easy, but doing the reverse is hard. Current standards rely on modular arithmetic, where numbers go around the circle like a clock, and multiplying and factoring large prime numbers, say 2048 or 4096 bits. These are huge numbers. Multiplying them into a product is the easy part, but factoring the result

back to the prime numbers takes too many centuries, if possible at all, even with the largest supercomputers. But a quantum computer of the right size and architecture could do it in a matter of hours. So we need new algorithms, and those need to be evaluated and tested to make sure there are no undetected shortcuts. The announced algorithms are ML-KEM. ML means module lattice, the underlying math, and KEM stands for key encapsulation mechanism. This one is for general encryption, like secured websites. The second one is ML-DSA, ML as before, and DSA is for digital signature algorithm. And the third one is SLH-DSA. The DSA part stays the same for digital signatures, but SLH is for stateless hash base, which is a different algorithm that is even more secure,

but can be slower or produce larger keys. NIST has been working on PQC for many years, so the announcement is the result of extensive evaluations. Laws about implementing PQC have been working their way through the legislative process, and the U.S. government has been taking steps to repair the ground and mitigate risk. Legislation in late 2022 asked the Office of Management and Budget to issue guidance. This announcement is important because it comes in the form of FIPS, which stands for Federal Information Processing Standards publication. It describes three quantum-resistant cryptographic algorithms and serves as a signal to organizations that they can proceed because they now know what to implement. A headline landed in my inbox the other day that caught my

eye. Two English professors, one from Clemson and the other at Portland State, have won a six-figure grant from the National Science Foundation to, quote, open the exascale black box of the Aurora supercomputer at Argonne National Lab. The point of their research will be to trace the socio-technical alliances that enable big science. Shaheen, this may be the first time I've seen English professors mixed up with supercomputers, but we wish them all the best in their research. It's excellent. I like to think of this as a natural result of supercomputing starting to impact society and the global order. The two professors teach professional communications and technical writing, and they'll split

the $215,000 grant. They aim to reveal insights into the everyday life of those who keep supercomputers running and the impact of scientific research done on an exascale system. They also notably want to trace the geopolitical push for faster supercomputing, a major source of competition between the U.S. and China and internationally in general. We'll look forward to seeing the results of their work. All right, that's it for this episode. Thank you all for being with us hpc news bites is a production of orion x in association with inside hpc shaheen khan and

doug black host the show every episode is featured on inside hpc.com and posted on orionx.net thank you for listening