05/20/2024 What I Read Last Week
#DigitalInfrastructure news: Top500 Supercomputers, Quantum Computing, CoreWeave, Google
Weekly Edition of curated news about Digital Infrastructure
[Link] The 63rd edition of the TOP500 was released, and the DOE Frontier supercomputer remained in the top spot, at 1.206 EFlop/s (exaflop/s = at least 10^18 or one quintillion floating point operations per second). The number one spot on the GREEN500 was claimed by JEDI - JUPITER Exascale Development Instrument, a new system from EuroHPC/FZJ in Germany, with an energy efficiency rating of 72.73 GFlops/Watt.
[Link] Why Supercomputing centers are installing on-site Quantum Computers. Recently QuEra Computing was contracted to build a neutral-atom quantum computer for Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST). The computer is being installed on-premises alongside the Nvidia-powered ABCI-Q supercomputer by 2025 as part of Japan’s national initiative to advance its quantum computing capabilities.
[Link] Cerebras Systems in collaboration with researchers from Sandia, Lawrence Livermore, and Los Alamos National Laboratories, have achieved an extraordinary breakthrough in molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. Using the second generation Cerebras Wafer Scale Engine (WSE-2), researchers were able to perform atomic scale simulations at the millisecond scale – 179x faster than what is possible on the world’s leading supercomputer ‘Frontier,’ which is built with 39,000 GPUs.
[Link] Quantum computing startup Alice & Bob announced the availability on Google Cloud Marketplace of its single cat-cubit chip in the ‘Boson’ series. The company explains the cat qubit chip as having a unique property: that they can exponentially supress bit-flip errors while only linearly increasing phase-flip errors. 🤯 Perplexity.ai - please help me understand this!!
[Link] Fresh off of a $1.1 billion funding round, AI Hyperscaler CoreWeave has secured a $7.5 billion debt financing facility, led by Blackstone and Magnetar.
[Link] While Google was showing off its new generative AI features at Google I/O last week, it also launched Trillium, its sixth-generation Tensor Processing Unit. Google claims that the new chips have a 4.7X increase in peak compute performance per chip, have doubled the High Bandwidth Memory capacity and bandwidth, and also doubled the Interchip Interconnect bandwidth over TPU v5e.
[Link] Intel nears deal with Apollo for $11 Billion Ireland partnership. The transaction would have Appolo Global Management supply more than $11 billion to help Intel build a plant in Ireland. Intel recently appointed Kevin O’Buckley as senior vice president and general manager of Foundry Services.
[Link] Digital Realty announced the availability of groundbreaking liquid-to-chip cooling technology, the next evolution in high-density deployment support. The new offering introduces direct liquid cooling (DLC), bringing liquid directly to customers' infrastructure.
[Link] A $3 billion data center has been proposed outside of Richmond, Virginia by real estate development company Province Group. The 119.9 acre plot will consist of three data center buildings, with 1.5 million sq ft of floor space.
[Link] Cologix announced its collaboration with BT, one of the world’s leading providers of managed communication and security services, to introduce new PoPs across four of Cologix’s Canadian data centers.
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