Recap of ISC 2024 in Hamburg, Germany

The ISC 2024 edition took place on May 12-16 in Hamburg, Germany.

The conference and expo zone were a good opportunity to measure some market trends, directions and developments in HPC, AI, analytics and Quantum computing but also processors, storage and cooling. ISC, like SuperComputing, are 2 conferences famous for their content and education sessions and this year, as usual the program was rich.

As storage is mandatory with the explosion of data volumes, being collected, generated and processed, several key players exhibited there. We clearly enter in the era of the learning and generative aspect of information following data and discovered information eras.

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More than 3,400 attendees globally joined the event, according the organizers. We count more than 130 exhibitors with 40+ sponsors. Among them we noticed the presence of Dell Technologies, Google Cloud, Hammerspace, HPE, IBM, Lenovo, Microsoft, Nvidia, Vast Data, Vdura or Weka. Nvidia didn’t have a booth but was present at many partners’ places.

But we didn’t find any booth for 2CRSi, AWS, Hitachi Vantara, NetApp or Western Digital. AMD was not present as well except on a small partner booth.

It’s always strange to see an announcement the same week from a company insisting on AI but absent of the event. This is what NetApp did confirming its distance from AI and HPC storage domains, NetApp leverages BeeGFS, an open source parallel file system, when needed.

As these domains are hungry in processors, we met lots of server vendors from many places, Asia, USA and Europe: AIC, ASRock, ASUS, Boston, Dell, Eviden, Fujitsu, Gigabyte, HPE, IBM, Kaytus, Lenovo, MSI, NEC, Supermicro, Tyan, xFusion and ZTE associated with the Turkish Netas. Among them, 2 ex-Chinese companies, Kaytus and xFusion, now operate under a new name for international market needs bypassing commerce restrictions. Arc Compute was also there to speak about GPU-as-a-service and companies like Groq, SambaNova for AI processors or IonQ for Quantum computing.

On the storage and data management domains, many companies took advantage of the show to display obviously their last developments, successes and case studies and some even unveils new things.

As already mentioned several times, AI has 2 influences in the storage domain. First, storage for AI or AI storage invite several players to offer an updated file system implementation with often support of Nvidia GPUDirect, when Nvidia is involved, and a potential need. This is by far what parallel fil system players did and do and again a confirmation of some sort of convergence between HPC and AI. The second aspect is AI in storage or data management with several product iterations offering new capabilities. One angle could be around content indexing with a learning dimension but it seems that this AI contribution in the domain is more at an early stage with several new developments coming.

Among companies and organizations exhibiting there, we can list Atempo, Bittware, Croit, DDN, Graid, Hammerspace, Huawei, iRods, PoINT Software and Systems, QStar, Samsung, Seagate, Spectra Logic, Starfish, Toshiba, Vast Data, Vdura (ex Panasas) or Weka. The latter has made a big splash with its new VC round becoming an official storage unicorn, and several others wait their own event to unveil new stuff. Toshiba announced also new 31 and 32TB HDDs from Japan and these drives were not exposed at their booth. Global data view, move and access had some presence, of course with Hammerspace, including archiving with QStar and Point, and file systems with classic NAS or parallel approaches were of course well promoted as said above. DAOS was a bit mentioned, RDMA everywhere bug very low presence of CXL. Object storage for high demanding had some visibility at a few places especially with DDN Infinia.

The Top500 listing was also unveiled, even with a future date of publication, always a strange behavior, with some confirmations and new positions and it confirms that parallel file system, at scale, in that HPC and AI domain, have some advantages and preferences.

And we also met contacts from companies not exhibiting like Tuxera or Nodeum.

ISC 2025 will also take place at the same congress center in Hamburg June 10-13, 2025.