@HPC Podcast Archives - OrionX.net - HPC News Bytes – 20241216

Episode Date: December 16, 2024

- Google "Willow" quantum chip: hype or reality? - European supercomputing site chooses US vendor: LRZ's Blue Lion - China-US technology clash and mutual retaliation - ORNL supercomputers accelerate research on this fast-growing tree [audio mp3="https://orionx.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/HPCNB_20241216.mp3"][/audio] The post HPC News Bytes – 20241216 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. There was interesting news, quantum news, from Google last week. Actually, it's a public announcement of a paper published a few months ago and positioned as an update to their announcement five years ago relating to quantum superiority, which is the capability of a quantum

system to solve problems faster than classical HPC. Google announced that its latest quantum computer called Willow delivers unprecedented performance on a quantum benchmark and has made significant advances in error correction. Hartmut Nevin, leader of Google Quantum AI, blogged last week that Willow can reduce errors exponentially as the system scales up using more qubits. This, he said, cracks a challenge in quantum error correction that the field has pursued for almost 30 years, unquote. He also reported the system performed a computation on the Random Circuits Sampling, RCS, benchmark in under five minutes that would take a Nexus-scale supercomputer 10 septillion, that's 10 to the 25th years. Shaheen, I wouldn't call you a quantum

skeptic, but you have criticized the industry for indulging in hype. So what's your take on this news? Well, to paraphrase Neil Armstrong, it's one giant step for a man and a small step for mankind. And no, it cannot do any of the things that you might be led to believe it can. But from an engineering standpoint, the new results are not controversial and represent excellent work. They announced the chip with twice more qubits and with much better quality because of the breakthrough in error correction that you referred to. So the qubits last longer and can do more and longer computation.

It is a significant milestone in quality and quantity, but both of them need to improve a lot more, say five to ten times more or even beyond that, to get close to real. From a hype standpoint, the news reached the general public, but without guardrails, setting expectations that were quickly generalized to fantasy and led to misleading headlines. You can think of the benchmark as a test of what a quantum computer is supposed to be good at. It is useful for that purpose. But in terms of user applications, it is useless. And Google said as much. It is not even a kernel benchmark. It exercises the system's muscles in random ways

and shows that a quantum computer is indeed a quantum computer. So to ask a classical computer to do it is double useless. Now, you have to verify that the quantum computer actually did the work. And that needs a classical computer. But verification cannot be done on a classical computer without extrapolations because, well, it takes that long to run the actual benchmark. The real news was an error correction, and it boosts the superconducting approach to quantum computing. This puts it back in the race with trapped ion and neutral atom modalities,

both of which are strong in fidelity and coherence times. Sticking with system news, for quantum processing units, QPUs, and quantum computers, European sites are strongly leaning towards indigenous vendors, as one can see in Euro HPC projects. But when it comes to CPUs and GPUs and their system vendors, they seem much more open to US manufacturers. So LRZ, the well-known German supercomputing center in Leibniz, that's been on the top 500 list since 1992 when they had a Cray YMP, and then other systems from several other vendors along the way, is going with HPE and NVIDIA for its next system. The system will be called Blue Lion. It costs 250 million euros and is targeted for production in 2027. Yes, and HPE said the system will have the slingshot 400 gigabits per second interconnect. As for performance, Blue Lion will deliver

approximately 30 times more compute power than SuperMUK-NG, the current LRZ HPC system. Also, Blue Lion will have direct liquid cooling in which 40-degree centigrade warm water flows through the racks in copper pipes. The water cooling system allows the waste heat from the system to be reused. LRZ already uses HPC waste heat to warm its offices and could in future supply other organizations in the neighborhood while also reducing operating costs and carbon dioxide emissions, a capability we applaud. Chris Miller, the author of Chip War about the geotechno-political struggle between the U.S. and China, recently appeared as a guest on an NPR station in Boston to discuss the PRC launching an antitrust investigation into NVIDIA this week

after the U.S. crackdown on shipments of advanced chips to China. It's part of the ongoing mutual retaliation the countries are engaged in. Reuters reported last week that China has launched an investigation into NVIDIA over suspected violations of the country's anti-monopoly law. I guess it comes with the territory when you are as successful and as in demand as NVIDIA has been, and you're caught in the middle of a geopolitical clash. The entity in China is the State Administration for Market Regulation, and it did not explain how the U.S. company may have violated China's anti-monopoly laws.

As usual in sensitive situations like this, both sides want to take action without causing escalation or self-harm. So if China can't get the high-end chips from NVIDIA anyway, then giving it a hard time might be an okay way to retaliate without escalating. Earlier this month,

the Chinese government said it has banned exports of key minerals like gallium, germanium, and antimony to the U.S. that are important for manufacturing semiconductors, military equipment, and for general industrial use. Only a small to trace amounts are used in chip manufacturing, and some of it can be recycled in principle. But the global supply is dominated by China, with 94% for gallium, 83% for germanium, and what is viewed as a, quote, large share, end quote, for antimony. Other countries include Russia and Canada. Okay, I've claimed a personal privilege on our final story. Speaking as an amateur arborist, I have a strong liking for a tree that can boost photosynthesis and tree height by 30% in the field and 200% in the greenhouse. The project used the supercomputing resources at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, and it's another example of how HPC is addressing

critical challenges facing our planet, in this case, potentially boosting biomass and higher crop yields. Okay, that's it for this episode. Thanks so much for being with us. HPC News Bites 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.