Supercomputing 25 (SC25)
Mid-week sessions at SC25, along with PetaFLOP 2025, the big multi-vendor after-party, held this year at the Missouri Athletic Club down the street from the confernece venue.
Quite a bit of focus on the impacts of AI on HPC usage and deployment; TACC in particualr did a good job explaining their journey the past few years, and SDSC had some very pragmatic advice from their experience. Power densities that were increasing last year seem to have stayed the same this year; deployment timetables at the leading edge for increased power continue to increase, but they didn't seem to break the expectations set in 2024. Focus on energy efficiency gains going from air-cooled datacenters to liquid-cooled ones got quite a bit of time, and was very good to see such large efficiency improvements. Some mixed efforts on HPC workforce development, with some practical sessions, some advice on collaboration, and some that might have been good but did not convey well at all (downright poorly) in a 90-minute session.
Dipped more into hardware as well, with some very useful info on the balances to be found in CPU and memory architecture choices in HPC, plus some of the complexities of networking in HPC. Looks like RDMA over converged ethernet (RoCE), now RoCE v2, is looking quite good, although there is still some complexity if you are trying to bond 3 or more NIC's together. With affordable 100GbE, not sure how much of a concern that is for smaller HPCs, but was still a fun talk to attend.
The multi-vendor party, PetaFLOP 2025, was a bit too crowded for its own good. I missed out on the OpenHPC happy hour due to being at an HPC education and workforce development birds of a feather; by the time I arrived at the Missour Athletic Club, it was packed. It was nice to get some vendor time, although not as much as hoped. Lenovo had a fully liquid-cooled server on display, which was good to examine in detail.
Mid-week fooding was highlighted by just how good the hotel breakfast was; not as good as Rooster on Monday, but still quite tasty (and free!). Hi-Pointe Drive-In, across the street from the convention center, gets mobbed at lunch, but a wait til mid-day revealed a very decent smashburger and fries. Not worth the crazy peak waits, but tasty enough otheriwse. Was much better than dinner the night before at Sen Thai, which had a somewhat overcooked, slightly odd combo chow mein with cashews and grapes (?!), along with entirely okay-if-forgettable ginger cocktail. Sen Thai's dinner was probably about the same quality as Mizu Sushi the next night, where the sashimi was decidedly not cheap and quite ordinary. Sen Thai at least had some atmosphere inside; felt kind of bad for Mizu Sushi as they were both understaffed and a bit short on decor. Safest path seems to be to avoid Asian food here, even if you're desperate.