LightTrends Newsletter

By Roy Rubenstein, Igor Lomtev, and Bob Wheeler
December 5, 2024

The Supercomputing Conference 2024 (SC24), held in Atlanta, Georgia, set record for a second year running with over 18,000 attendees. This compares with SC23’s record attendance of 14,300. At SC24, held during November 17-22, 2024, some 500 companies and organizations exhibited, occupying 30% more floor space compared to the 2023 event. For a quarter of the exhibitors, this was their first show.

The prominent theme at this year’s event was artificial intelligence (AI) and its influence on high-performance computing (HPC), the traditional theme of the event. AI is starting to be used to benefit high-performance computing workloads executed on the largest supercomputers. The AI marketplace now dwarfs the high-performance computing market. GPUs are as key for supercomputers as they are for AI. But the focus on lower precision math for AI workloads is raising concerns that high-performance computing, with its dependency on high-precision 32-bit and 64-bit floating point arithmetic, is being neglected.

Photonics has a low profile at the SC conferences despite its importance in scaling supercomputers and AI clusters. As such, only a handful of this year’s conference sessions addressed photonics. Indeed, photonics had an even lower profile than last year’s show. However, photonics had its strongest presence yet on the exhibition floor. The simplest explanation for the contrasting conference and exhibition profile of photonics is that optical input-output (I/O) has still to impact AI and HPC systems in a significant way. But signs are there that this is coming.

Highlights of SC24 include:

• A new US exascale computer, El Capitan, which claimed the number one spot in the latest Top500 supercomputer listings.
• Developments and updates in interconnects and fabrics including chip firm Enfabrica announcing a new round of funding.
• Ayar Labs working with Fujitsu, which detailed their work on the need for packaged optics as part of future high-performance computing systems. This is in addition to Drut Technologies, that is using co-packaged optics for its disaggregation server architecture.
• NextSilicon unveiled its Maverick-2, a new class of processor tailored for high-performance computing.
• New network and interconnect standards from the Ultra Ethernet Consortium and Ultra Accelerator Link Consortium which are moving quickly toward release.

The focus of the Supercomputing Conference includes software, algorithms, and applications. But hardware—supercomputers, quantum technologies, cooling, processors, memory, and interconnects including optics—had a key presence too. This research note includes high-performance computing systems and processors, infrastructure trends for AI, and photonics. LightCounting had three analysts attending SC24, but we do not claim to cover all the event’s noteworthy announcements.

Full text of the research note is available to LightCounting subscribers at: https://www.lightcounting.com/login