Three things you might have missed from SC22 – SiliconANGLE

Supercomputing evolved from niche uses, like the weather forecastand now relies on artificial intelligence and machine learning, with the power of these systems increasing dramatically.

The present and the future of high performance computing were exposed for The International Conference Event on High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analyticsalso known as SC22, which took place from November 15-17. TheCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s live streaming studio, covered the entire event, including exclusive interviews with experts from leading IT companies specializing in supercomputing and cloud computing. (*Disclosure below.)

In case you missed it, here are three key insights from the SC22 event:

1) Supercomputing seems ready to explode on a global scale.

Before SC22 kicks off, theCUBE host and industry analyst furry jeans in other words: “It’s a hardware nerd festival of the best minds.”

This was evident throughout the convention hall, with a flurry of major announcements from top industry players. Nvidia Corp. introduces new high performance computing solutions for researchers, Cerebras Systems Inc. has unveiled an AI supercomputerand Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. announced a new wallet for its line of Cray supercomputers.

During the Day 1 Keynote Analysis Segment, theCUBE co-host Savannah Peterson – who considers herself a “very open hardware nerd” – said SC22 made her happy to see what early trends in AI found their way into business use cases. . 5-10 years ago there was a lot of hype around quantum and AI, but these advanced technologies have always been difficult to scale, as the hardware was not yet ready to power this type of effort.

“Now we have air cooling, we have liquid cooling, we have several [graphics processing units]. Dell was showing me all eight that they put in their magnificent million-dollar gear, which is extremely impressive for people who do complex calculations,” Peterson recalls. “But what excites me is that I love when we merge business and academics. I think that doesn’t happen very often.

Here is the full video of theCUBE Day 1 Keynote analysis discussion:

2) Dell is considering large-scale initiatives in AI and high-performance computing.

Among the many notable announcements at SC22 was Dell Technologies Inc. unveiling its PowerEdge XE9680 system. Billed as the first system with eight Nvidia GPUs interconnected with Nvidia’s NVLink, Dell designed it to meet growing customer demand for large-scale artificial intelligence and high-performance computing initiatives.

Travis Vigil, senior vice president of product management at Dell, said the company is hearing from customers that AI workloads and traditional HPC workloads are becoming nearly indistinguishable. What’s important is trying to understand what customers are trying to do, taking all the different streams of data, structured and unstructured, and putting them together to make business decisions.

“It’s a really exciting time because customers are saying the same things that researchers and universities have always been trying to do with HPC: ‘I want to do it at industrial scale, but I want to do it in a more open, more flexible,” he said.

What Vigil calls “AI for the rest of us”, the last iteration of Dell’s PowerEdge line will provide additional support for the AI ​​initiatives the company announced earlier this year, including Dell Validated Design for AI.

Here’s theCUBE’s full video interview with Travis Vigil:

3) Where is all this heading? Space.

High-performance computing has compelling use cases in various industries, but none as exciting as the final frontier. To NASA Global Modeling Assimilation Bureau, scientists are maximizing the use of observations taken from outer space, integrating them into a cohesive and cohesive physical system of Earth. The demands are enormous as it involves modeling all NASA Earth data.

Over the next decade, NASA made a long term commitment to build a open source scientific community. That’s why scientists are excited about the technology they hope to be able to use soon, according to two NASA scientists who spoke with theCUBE at the event.

“For me, it’s accelerator technologies. The limiting factor for us as scientists is how quickly we can get an answer,” said Dr. Bill Putman (photo, left)associate chief of the Global Modeling and Assimilation Office at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, told CUBE at the event.

“If we can get our answer faster with accelerated technologies, with the support of NCCS and data centers, but also software engineers who allow us, then we can do more and push the questions even further,” Putman said.

Dr. and Duffy (photo, right)chief of the office of computer and information science and technology at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, said what excites him is the software frameworks that surround the simulations his colleagues want to do.

“Technology, they deal with how to use it in the most efficient and energy efficient way; it is extremely important,” he said. “That’s what I’m really here to try to understand better, how can I support these scientists not only with the hardware, but also with the software frameworks through which they can be successful?”

Here is theCUBE’s full video interview with Dr. Bill Putman and Dr. Dan Duffy:

To watch more of theCUBE’s coverage of SC22here is our full video playlist of the event:

(*Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Event SC22. Neither Dell Technologies Inc., the primary sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor the other sponsors have editorial control over theCUBE’s or SiliconANGLE’s content.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE