Episode 271: Updates from ISC19

I mean, this trend that we've seen towards greater processor diversity, it's really hitting its mark here in Frankfurt this week.

Absolutely.

And I would say that's one of the top things that we're talking about with people on the show floor today.

And I will say I'm seeing a lot of momentum with AMD EPYC that seems to be showing up in a lot of the booths, a lot of the demos, a lot of the product discussions.

There's a lot of momentum with that.

And as a result, I think it's also putting a lot of pressure on And I will say, I'll just go ahead and say I'm disappointed in NVIDIA that they're not exhibiting with a booth.

I know some of the people are here.

But, you know, this is a show where you have to show support for the HPC community.

And as a result, I feel like NVIDIA is knocked back a bit.

AMD has the opportunity to show some of their epic plus Radeon technologies.

NVIDIA, meanwhile, they have a bit of a struggle in the sense that they're reliant on a microprocessor there somewhere.

And they're not best friends with Intel.

Now AMD is on the scene with another GPU.

But NVIDIA has got some notable news of their own despite not being here.

releasing a press release reaffirming their partnership with ARM.

Yeah, NVIDIA had several news announcements that week.

That was at the top of them.

They announced that they're recommitting, reaffirming their support for Arm to make Arm a full citizen and the processing architectures that they support, along with x86 and the IBM Power Chips, too.

And they're just seeing, as we are, the increasing activity and momentum for alternatives to x86 CPUs and momentum for Arm.

We saw that Arm, there's now a petascale arm on the top third of the top 500 list, the Sandia system Astra.

A little bit of interesting backstory here.

We know way back in 2011, there was this Project Denver project at NVIDIA that they were going to make a full-featured ARM chip.

That didn't really materialize, but they did do some more kind of embedded things for mobile and robotics and gaming with ARM plus GPU.

So they've had their toes in the ARM ecosystem, and we've kind of seen this ARM plus GPU software development off and on at PGI Portland, the Portland group, and with the open ACC community.

But I was always kind of perennial in limbo.