@HPC Podcast Archives - OrionX.net - HPC News Bytes – 20241125

Episode Date: November 25, 2024

- Supercomputing show SC24 moves closer to mainstream - Hyperion's HPC Market Sizing - Huawei AI chips, trade restrictions [audio mp3="https://orionx.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/HPCNB_20241125.mp3"][/audio] The post HPC News Bytes – 20241125 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. Some of us in the HPC community, me included, feel HPC doesn't always get its just due as a locomotive of change in IT, in science, and in AI, but perhaps that's changing. The SC24 conference last week in Atlanta was at the center of the tech industry for the week, attracting just

over 18,000 attendees, which is more than a 25% jump from last year. There were nearly 500 exhibitors from 29 countries. And if an industry's standing can be measured in distances walked by members of the media, then I can't recall four days in which I walked more than last week. The show hall was enormous and the energy was high. The general feeling was very upbeat. Of course, with the upbeat feeling comes the struggle by vendors to compete, to stand out and to stay ahead. Yeah, the convention hall in Atlanta looked like spaghetti code that needed to be vectorized

and parallelized. Wonderful show. And as usual, what you see at the supercomputer show is advanced technologies across the board. You see everything. Significant growth, as you mentioned, as the show becomes more interesting to mainstream IT and commercial customers, a lot of it driven by AI. Initial count was 17,250 attendees, but the show ended with more than 18,000 attendees. By comparison, SC23 was 14,250 and SC22 was 11,500 attendees, so massive growth. We'll do a proper post view on the show, but here it'd be fun to go over the themes of supercomputing shows over the years. Starting in SC14, they adopted a two-word sentence template, and it's generally held. SC 14 was HPC matters.

Then in succession, HPC transforms. HPC matters. They use that again. HPC connects. HPC inspires. HPC is now. HPC is everywhere we are, more than HPC. The next one didn't have HPC is it was science and beyond. HPC accelerates. I am HPC. That was last year and I really liked that one. And then this year was HPC creates. Next year's theme is HPC ignites. So let the countdown begin.

Yeah. Another feature of the week was Hyperion. They held their annual market update breakfast during the conference, and as usual, only more so. It was a standing room only occasion. Overall, Hyperion said HPCAI spending, including everything, hardware, software, services, is projected to reach $52 billion in 2024. As for market share among on-prem server vendors, Hyperion puts HP at number one with $4.7 billion in sales and a 31% share, followed by Dell with a share of 24% and Lenovo at 9%. Looking ahead, Hyperion predicts total HPCAI spending on-prem and cloud will reach $85 billion by 2028. As for leadership systems,

Hyperion puts revenue for the Exascale segment at $1.3 billion this year, a figure that could double by 2028. A few other highlights from Hyperion, the HPCAI on-premises market is expected to grow by over 22% this year. If you limit it to just AI, the AI focused on-prem servers sales are growing at close to 40%. So 40 versus 22, showing that AI is driving most of the growth. And the HPC cloud market will see growth of more than 20% as well, also boosted by AI. Hyperion said access to the latest hardware and the ability to quickly set up AI workloads are key drivers for the cloud market. This is consistent with what I see as well. What I see is organizations going through a testing and learning period, and then they need

the right use case business case, that duo, and then implementation and integration of the applications that are necessary. System installations comes towards the end of that process. Quick catch up on China and Huawei and technopolitics in action. Huawei's current AI chip, the Ascend 910B, is manufactured by local Chinese fab company SMIC. As we've covered here before, SMIC has been trying to build higher-end chips using lower-end equipment. This causes a big reduction in yields.

For the 910B chip, the yield is about 50%, which lowers production volumes and increases costs. 50% is not commercially viable. You need at least 70%. But that's okay when you are pursuing a capability as a nation and can afford it. The next generation chip, the SN910C, is slated for production in 2025 using SMIC's new N plus 2 process. This one is even lower yield at 20 percent. Separately, there was news in Wall Street Journal that pointed to the difficulty of blocking China's supply chain despite U.S. export controls and sanctions. If the report proves to be accurate and there is in fact a breach, they did not say what the U.S. can do about the situation. Shaheen, you might agree it's not a complete surprise

to see such a report. The article titled, Mystery Surrounds Discovery of TSMC Tech Inside Huawei AI Chips, says there is core circuitry in the 910B chip that researchers are tracing to TSMC. This is based on work done by Tech Insights, a company in Canada that performs product teardowns. So exactly how it got there is the mystery. For example, it is conceivable that it was sold to another company before the regulations kicked in. As we discussed in episode 42 of the HPC podcast with Chris Miller, the author of the book Chip War, the supply chain for chips is highly complex, and this also makes controlling it complex and difficult. 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 Inside HPC. All right. That's it for this episode. Thank you all for being with us.