Since 1987 - Covering the Fastest Computers in the World and the People Who Run Them
Since 1987 - Covering the Fastest Computers in the World and the People Who Run Them
By Oliver Peckham and Tiffany Trader
Supercomputing has been indispensable throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, from modeling the virus and its spread to designing vaccines and therapeutics. But, despite supercomputers’ formative role in our understanding of Covid-19, supercomputing conferences have been aligning their Covid policies more closely with local ordinances than with that hard-won scientific knowledge. That should change.
ISC 2022 was an exceptional showing for the conference organizers, supercomputing (exascale, officially!) and the European HPC community. Unfortunately, those successes now have a SARS-CoV-2-shaped asterisk. Over the past several days, several high-profile attendees have taken to Twitter to reveal that they tested positive for Covid-19 at or immediately after ISC 2022. Further, HPCwire can confirm that there were additional Covid infections among ISC 2022 attendees, including (but not limited to) two of HPCwire’s own eight-person contingent. (Both of our team members who tested positive are recovering well and have since tested negative.)
ISC 2022 did not have a vaccination requirement or a mask requirement, with the notable exception of the main keynote hall, which did require masks for entry. The conference did recommend social distancing and masking with FFP2 masks (which the conference made readily available and which are roughly equivalent to a KN95 or N95 mask). However, neither of those recommendations were widely followed among attendees, with the exception of a rigorous few. The ISC 2022 Covid policies aligned with the Covid policies in Hamburg, Germany, where ISC 2022 was held: Hamburg only requires FFP2 masks in a few specific areas (like healthcare facilities and public transport).
If you’re having a sense of déjà vu, you’re not alone. A similar conversation emerged ahead of SC21 in St. Louis, Missouri, the first major supercomputing conference to return to an in-person format in the wake of the Covid vaccines. In August 2021, the SC21 chair said that the conference would not implement a vaccine requirement unless required to do so by the city of St. Louis; after several weeks of community outcry, the conference changed course to require proof of vaccination. The conference also required indoor masking, in line with the mask mandate in St. Louis at the time. HPCwire did hear of one person who contracted Covid at a party during SC21.
The health and safety implications of Covid exposure are far and away the most important, but Covid risks also have implications for the conferences themselves. At least one person was not able to present at ISC 2022 due to their positive test; others missed important meetings due to their positive tests or the need to test in the wake of direct exposure. For those who tested positive at ISC 2022, the financial and logistical burdens of the mandatory quarantine (a minimum of five days) have been severe. Previously, ahead of SC21, many speakers and exhibitors chose to pull out of the conference or go virtual amid concerns over Covid spread at the conference. We believe that positive Covid tests and elevated fears of contracting Covid are almost certainly much more detrimental to these conferences than any inconveniences that might stem from mask or vaccine requirements.
For the past three years, all of us have had to contend with difficult decisions, and many of us have felt guilt, anxiety and uncertainty as the science and the circumstances rapidly evolved. It bears mentioning that navigating the tension between what is required and what is advisable in terms of Covid policy for a major conference is an extraordinarily unenviable task with little precedent, few constant variables and even fewer broadly accepted (let alone adhered-to) norms. It’s also worth noting that there will likely remain a significant and inherent Covid risk associated with travel in the coming years – a risk over which conference organizers have no control outside of host city selection.
Nevertheless, we believe that supercomputing conferences in particular have a responsibility to exemplify the best scientific understanding of Covid spread in their policies. Much of that understanding, as it pertains to gatherings, stems directly from supercomputing research – particularly research on Riken’s Fugaku supercomputer, which launched a year ahead of schedule specifically to support Covid research and which placed first on four consecutive Top500 lists. The research conducted on Fugaku has consistently elucidated how viral droplets spread in shared spaces and interact with barriers like masks and face shields.
Indeed, in the Twitter conversation surrounding Covid infections at ISC 2022, Satoshi Matsuoka – director of Riken’s Center for Computational Science – cited Fugaku-based research. “According to Fugaku simulations, masks protect well against someone infected not showering droplets&aerosols around them,” Matsuoka tweeted. “[Masking] is effective but less against inhaling aerosols w/viruses. As such they are very effective if everyone wears them.”
In alignment with this and other research, Riken’s 19-person contingent at the conference was triple-vaccinated, fully masked throughout the conference and tested negative via PCR test before and after the conference. Not everyone exhibiting this level of care was so lucky, though: Addison Snell, who tested positive after ISC, was employing similar measures – but, as Matsuoka indicated, there is only so much that an uninfected individual’s mask will protect them if few others are wearing one. For truly effective protection, there needs to be broad adoption of preventative measures.
The next major supercomputing conference will be SC22, held in Dallas, Texas, from November 13-18, 2022. The state of Texas currently has an executive order banning organizations – including private businesses – from mandating vaccines for their customers. However, Time reported that many businesses were ignoring this ban, and it is also unclear whether this ban would affect the NY- and NJ-based organizations behind SC22 if they were, for instance, to require proof of vaccination during registration rather than at the conference center. There is no ban in Texas that prevents private businesses from mandating masks. The SC22 Covid page, for its part, says that the organizers “are committed to following regional jurisdiction guidelines and rules in maintaining a safe environment for our attendees.”
HPCwire hopes that, for the foreseeable future, supercomputing conferences exceed the minimum requirements and commit themselves, instead, to Covid policies guided by the outstanding science made possible by supercomputers.
Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industy updates delivered to you every week!
Because humans are by our nature biased, our data — and our code — will necessarily be as well, said Ayanna Howard, dean of The Ohio State University College of Engineering. But there is hope: Sometimes we can levera Read more…
Arizona State University (ASU) has announced that its new supercomputer, “Sol,” will launch this summer. Sol, pictured in the header image courtesy of ASU's Andy DeLisle, is set to supplement ASU’s existing superco Read more…
It may seem like just a moment since ISC 2022 wrapped up in Hamburg, but get ready: as of today, registration is open for SC22. The conference will be held in Dallas, Texas, from November 14-17, 2022. Early registration Read more…
GPU and accelerated-computing powerhouse Nvidia today announced a new programming platform – NVIDIA Quantum Optimized Device Architecture (QODA) – targeting development and management of applications run on hybrid cl Read more…
The supply chain for chips, already extraordinarily fraught with logistical and geopolitical impediments, is about to face another. According to a report from the risk analysis team at Resilinc, an AI-based supply chain Read more…
As companies shift high-performance workloads toward cloud solutions, data storage and data protection go side-by-side. Many companies have both internal and external security rules and regulations they must adhere to when storing their data. Read more…
Financial institutions such as banks, hedge funds, and mutual funds use quantitative analysis to make stock trades. An Investopedia article indicates, “Quantitative trading consists of trading strategies based on quantitative analysis, which rely on mathematical computations and number crunching to identify trading opportunities. Read more…
Robust quantum error correction (QEC) is a necessary ingredient for achieving practical quantum computing and as you might expect there’s an abundance of ongoing work in the area. Recently, separate teams of researcher Read more…
Because humans are by our nature biased, our data — and our code — will necessarily be as well, said Ayanna Howard, dean of The Ohio State University Colleg Read more…
It may seem like just a moment since ISC 2022 wrapped up in Hamburg, but get ready: as of today, registration is open for SC22. The conference will be held in D Read more…
GPU and accelerated-computing powerhouse Nvidia today announced a new programming platform – NVIDIA Quantum Optimized Device Architecture (QODA) – targeting Read more…
The supply chain for chips, already extraordinarily fraught with logistical and geopolitical impediments, is about to face another. According to a report from t Read more…
The supply chain pressures created by the Covid-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine are pushing nations into increasing conflict on the chipmaking front. Now, the U.S. is ratcheting up the stakes once again, reportedly working to stymie China’s expansion of its chipmaking capabilities by pressuring Dutch firm ASML from selling critical equipment to China. Read more…
There’s a growing interest among silicon providers backing RISC-V to introduce 48-bit computing in custom chips to meet their specific requirements. The 48-bit long instructions focus is more as a middle ground between 32-bit and 64-bit, which has largely been the focus of chips and instruction sets until now. Read more…
The battle against the slowing of Moore’s law continues. The latest front: 3D chip stacking, which has seen high-profile efforts from several companies as the Read more…
In this one-on-one interview, Doug Kothe – associate laboratory director, Computing and Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and director Read more…
Getting a glimpse into Nvidia’s R&D has become a regular feature of the spring GTC conference with Bill Dally, chief scientist and senior vice president of research, providing an overview of Nvidia’s R&D organization and a few details on current priorities. This year, Dally focused mostly on AI tools that Nvidia is both developing and using in-house to improve... Read more…
Intel has shared more details on a new interconnect that is the foundation of the company’s long-term plan for x86, Arm and RISC-V architectures to co-exist in a single chip package. The semiconductor company is taking a modular approach to chip design with the option for customers to cram computing blocks such as CPUs, GPUs and AI accelerators inside a single chip package. Read more…
In April 2018, the U.S. Department of Energy announced plans to procure a trio of exascale supercomputers at a total cost of up to $1.8 billion dollars. Over the ensuing four years, many announcements were made, many deadlines were missed, and a pandemic threw the world into disarray. Now, at long last, HPE and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have announced that the first of those... Read more…
The 59th installment of the Top500 list, issued today from ISC 2022 in Hamburg, Germany, officially marks a new era in supercomputing with the debut of the first-ever exascale system on the list. Frontier, deployed at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, achieved 1.102 exaflops in its fastest High Performance Linpack run, which was completed... Read more…
The first-ever appearance of a previously undetectable quantum excitation known as the axial Higgs mode – exciting in its own right – also holds promise for developing and manipulating higher temperature quantum materials... Read more…
The battle for datacenter dominance keeps getting hotter. Today, Nvidia kicked off its spring GTC event with new silicon, new software and a new supercomputer. Speaking from a virtual environment in the Nvidia Omniverse 3D collaboration and simulation platform, CEO Jensen Huang introduced the new Hopper GPU architecture and the H100 GPU... Read more…
PsiQuantum, founded in 2016 by four researchers with roots at Bristol University, Stanford University, and York University, is one of a few quantum computing startups that’s kept a moderately low PR profile. (That’s if you disregard the roughly $700 million in funding it has attracted.) The main reason is PsiQuantum has eschewed the clamorous public chase for... Read more…
Additional details of the architecture of the exascale El Capitan supercomputer were disclosed today by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s (LLNL) Terri Read more…
AMD is getting personal with chips as it sets sail to make products more to the liking of its customers. The chipmaker detailed a modular chip future in which customers can mix and match non-AMD processors in a custom chip package. "We are focused on making it easier to implement chips with more flexibility," said Mark Papermaster, chief technology officer at AMD during the analyst day meeting late last week. Read more…
HPCwire takes you inside the Frontier datacenter at DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Oak Ridge, Tenn., for an interview with Frontier Project Direc Read more…
Intel reiterated it is well on its way to merging its roadmap of high-performance CPUs and GPUs as it shifts over to newer manufacturing processes and packaging technologies in the coming years. The company is merging the CPU and GPU lineups into a chip (codenamed Falcon Shores) which Intel has dubbed an XPU. Falcon Shores... Read more…
The long-troubled, hotly anticipated MareNostrum 5 supercomputer finally has a vendor: Atos, which will be supplying a system that includes both Nvidia and Inte Read more…
MLCommons today released its latest MLPerf inferencing results, with another strong showing by Nvidia accelerators inside a diverse array of systems. Roughly fo Read more…
Just a couple of weeks ago, the Indian government promised that it had five HPC systems in the final stages of installation and would launch nine new supercomputers this year. Now, it appears to be making good on that promise: the country’s National Supercomputing Mission (NSM) has announced the deployment of “PARAM Ganga” petascale supercomputer at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)... Read more…
You may recall that efforts proposed in 2020 to remake the National Science Foundation (Endless Frontier Act) have since expanded and morphed into two gigantic bills, the America COMPETES Act in the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act in the U.S. Senate. So far, efforts to reconcile the two pieces of legislation have snagged and recent reports... Read more…
Close to a decade ago, AMD was in turmoil. The company was playing second fiddle to Intel in PCs and datacenters, and its road to profitability hinged mostly on Read more…
© 2022 HPCwire. All Rights Reserved. A Tabor Communications Publication
HPCwire is a registered trademark of Tabor Communications, Inc. Use of this site is governed by our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of Tabor Communications, Inc. is prohibited.