In this special guest feature, Bob Fletcher from Verne Global reflects on how liquid cooling technologies on display at SC19 represent more than just a wave. Bob Fletcher is VP of Artificial Intelligence at Verne Global. Perhaps it is because I returned from my last business trip of 2019 to a flooded house, but more likely it's all the wicked cool water-cooled equipment that I encountered at SC19 that I'm in a watery mood! Many of the hardware vendors at SC19 were pushing their exascale-ready devices and about 15% of the devices on a typical computer manufacturer's booth were water-cooled. Adding rack-level water cooling is theoretically straight forward, so I spent a few minutes checking out the various options. The first thing I noticed is that the chilled water from outside terminates in a Cooling Distribution Unit (CDU) which then has its own water-cooling loop which is connected to the computing equipment.

New York is always an exciting, energetic city to visit and ... was made even more so as I attended the (recent) 'HPC & AI on Wall Street' conference, which HPCWire are now championing. It was well worth the train ride from Boston and interesting to see the varied mix of attendees present and hear how HPC and AI is evolving in the world of finance. All sectors of the financial services industry (FSI) were represented at the conference from traditional, old school banks to venture capital firms, fintechs and hedge funds. AI adoptions varied from integrating machine learning into existing applications and processes to mining unearthly amounts of market data for a trading edge. My first lesson was there is a dichotomy between too much data volume and insufficient data context within this community. Don't worry the bank account and market value data is as solid as always.