HPE

In this vendor showdown presentation, HPE's speaker marks fifty years since the Cray-1 and traces a lineage from Seymour Cray's innovations through the EX4000 line to the forthcoming GX5000 generation of dense computing. He argues that no single system design fits all missions, positioning HPE's portfolio across leadership-class Cray supercomputing and rack-scale systems, and describes a future of extreme heterogeneity in which traditional modeling and simulation are closely coupled with AI training and inference and, eventually, quantum accelerators. Differentiators highlighted include direct liquid cooling for increasingly dense and power-hungry nodes, interconnects built on Ethernet economics for low latency and high bandwidth, open-source storage with Lustre and DAOS, and application performance engineering services spanning design, deployment, and support. In the question round, he argues that holding the Top500 lead requires more than core counts, emphasizing time to insight through minimizing data movement and giving customers tools to manage power and water consumption. Asked about the GX5000's up to 400 kilowatts per rack, he acknowledges that many centers cannot supply such power and stresses optimizing solutions for available resources. He considers zettascale achievable, though likely through heterogeneous rather than homogeneous designs combining classical, AI, and quantum computing, and closes by describing HPE's commitments to efficiency in its products and to reducing the environmental footprint of its own manufacturing.