| Homepage | https://www.glennklockwood.com/ |
In the few days I have between jobs, I wanted to share an unvarnished perspective on what I've learned after spending three years working on supercomputing in the cloud. It's hastily written and lightly edited, but I hope others find it interesting: https://blog.glennklockwood.com/2025/07/lessons-learned-from-three-years-in.html
In the last 18 hours, I’ve learned way more about adjuvanted vaccines and adverse reactions to them in cats than I ever cared to. And the real kick is that the choice to re-up the cat’s vaccines was an afterthought, because we had to take other cat in for minor surgery. Cat who got surgery has been fine; cat who didn’t was not.
Worst part is, I didn’t even get a photo of Arthur’s Popeye arm before he went back to the vet (for the third time…) this morning.
This is cool, but the real proof is in the quality of the frontier models that are trained on Blackwell. And by that metric, GB200 NVL72 has yet to deliver anything.
https://www.coreweave.com/blog/coreweave-leads-the-way-with-first-nvidia-gb300-nvl72-deployment
NERSC just announced that IBM and VAST have been selected as the storage providers for the upcoming Doudna #HPC system. Strong statement since NERSC had long invested in Lustre (scratch) and GPFS (community). Very cool to see NERSC not settling for the status quo.
https://www.nersc.gov/news-and-events/news/doudna-storage-solutions
The upcoming Doudna supercomputer at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) will partner next-generation high performance computing (HPC) capabilities with cutting-edge data storage solutions to meet the rapidly…
Microsoft is laying off 4% of its workforce (9,000 employees) which is separate from the 6,000 laid off in May, 300 in June and 2,000 laid off in January as low performers.
Today’s layoffs are to reduce layers of management.
The company beat estimates with $26B in profits and $70B in revenue during its last financial quarter.
Scott Atchley, who co-keynoted #ISC25, posted a really meaningful response to my ISC25 recap blog post on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/scottatchley_isc25-olcf-frontier-activity-7345786995765395457-lGoq). He specifically offered additional perspective on the 20 MW exascale milestone and the pitfalls of Ozaki. It's short but very valuable context.
I always enjoy reading Glenn K. Lockwood's conference recaps with #ISC25 recap being his latest. First, I was honored that AMD's Mark Papermaster invited me to share some science highlights from OLCF's Frontier. I shared that Frontier has grown slightly in the last year with the integration of the test and development system into the full system. My science highlights included: • GE Aerospace's efforts to reduce noise generated by their RISE engine that will allow GE Aero to bring it to market sooner, • NASA's work to understand how to use retro-propulsion to land humans and their gear on Mars, • Researchers refining the phase diagram for carbon by identifying the narrow region in pressure and temperature that would allow body-centric cubic (BC8) carbon to exist. This material is expected to be 30% harder than diamond, and • Efforts to understand how drug candidates interact with proteins. Unlike AI efforts such as AlphaFold that approximate protein docking, this effort uses Molecular Dynamics to got the two items close together then it switches to quantum mechanics to get an exact docking. This application actually used over 1 exaflop (1 EF) of full precision (FP64) on Frontier. I also highlighted what Frontier's replacement, Discovery, will need to support modeling/simulation as well as artificial intelligence. It will need bandwidth everywhere from processors to scale-up bandwidth between processors to scale-out bandwidth across the whole system in addition to lots of high-precision and low-precision FLOPS. I will reply with more comments. 🧵 #OLCF #Frontier
Dare Obasanjo
FZ Jülich-JSC