SC25: Recap of SuperComputing 2025

HPC and AI “lovers” converged recently to St Louis, MO, for the established SuperComputing show 2025 aka SC25. This edition was remarkable and 2 numbers speak for themselves: first, the official attendees number given by organizers reached 16,500 representing the second largest by attendance and second, the number of exhibitors climbed to 559, the largest in the history of the show. These 2 key metrics illustrates to central role of the conference in the industry and contrasts with the city moving in a strange direction… The US administration shutdown had also some visible impacts as some booths were transformed or just disappeared and some attendees had probably cancelled their trip.

As the conference is centered around computing, network, storage and analysis, this year was obviously full of AI related stuff as AI drives enormous needs to compute and associated resources. This is also because AI carries high business potential on the economy, already the case, and impacts on people. Our society lives a new revolution fueled by several decades on intense research in various domains. AI factory was on the lips and a common term for many many people.

No surprise, the education program coupled with workshops, panels and keynotes…was very rich with tons of interesting speeches on various topics. And keep in mind that SC is also the place where university, research centers and labs meet vendors and expose some of their works.

The expo floor was huge, we already mentioned the number of exhibitors, and organizers extended the surface with space on the football field, pretty unique. Surprisingly, among neoclouds and data centers players, Crusoe, Vultr, Lambda Labs or Nscale didn’t have a booth, we found CoreWeave and Nebius. Bizarre Crusoe and Vultr had a booth the week before at the KubeCon NA conference… Interesting green booth for Oracle coupled with Nvidia. Of course, the major cloud providers – AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Oracle as said, now considered in the top 4 – were present.

On the CPU and accelerators side, GPU and others flavors, we met of course many players, the usual suspects we should say, Intel, AMD, Nvidia, NextSilicon and ARM had spectacular booths, each displaying last product iterations and recent developments like Helios for AMD or Vera Rubin boards for Nvidia. The ecosystem is dense and active, all showing their boards design and product reality.

But we noticed the absence of SambaNova and Groq, present last year. Cerebras and SiPearl were there. We met processing card and DPU players like d-Matrix, who announced an impressive round, MangoBoost or Axelera AI in addition to classic players.

Quantum computing had also a presence and we saw IBM of course but also Quandela, Quantinuum, Quantum Computing or IonQ.

Beyond that, cooling and liquid flavors show always impressive hardware and it was once gain the case at several booth pushed by high demand for intensive and large compute configurations. Solidigm had a demo with Hypertec and Valvoline to immerse flash drives and boards in “special” liquid.

The networking presence was the opportunity to see real products especially from Broadcom, Nvidia again but also HPE. XSight Labs had a both in the stadium.

Two pavilions attracted people, the CXL Consortium and the Open Standards one – it was the opportunity to see CXL 4 and other developments from UnifabriX, XCena, Panmnesia, Teledyne LeCroy, Micron, AMD or Intel among others.

On the storage part, multiple presence and solutions with of course hardware ones but also software approaches. The recent TOP50 and IO500 results show newcomers and moves in the list even if we realize that China stopped participating. It’s a miss as they have real new technology in various domains. As parallel file storage is hot in such areas and a real requirement, all players had a booth, it was the case for DDN, Vast Data, Hammerspace or Weka plus others like Peak:AIO, ThinkParQ or Quobyte plus NetApp, Pure Storage and Dell who finally jumped seriously into the domain with some pNFS implementation. IBM showed as usual StorageScale and Lenovo continued to promote its open partnership on the HPC storage part, preparing something soon and the market expects the final confirmation of the Infinidat acquisition announced earlier this year. Qumulo had a small presence as well. DAOS had a special place especially as HPE pushed it a lot, it is well illustrated by the IO500 list and very large configurations. Open source is of course well represented everywhere as the HPC domain is also an active promoter of the license model and prefer to dedicate financial resource to hardware as they have software talents internally. MooseFS and Tuxera were also present, Tuxera announcing the NFS Fusion product, the companion of the SMB edition.

We met Leil Storage present at the WDC booth or Xinnor with its own space, changing a bit its messaging. Many vendors shows disk arrays, storage servers and cluster configurations leveraging specific software. Seagate, WDC, Hitachi Vantara, AIC, Viking, Gigabyte, Kaytus, Penguin, Celestica, Supermicro, Asus, Pegatron, Mitac and TrueNAS all show their new product iterations and shared market successes.

A few object storage instances have been seen from pure players and also as just a flavor of storage solutions especially with S3 API. We saw Cloudian, DataCore and Scality plus MinIO who had a pretty big booth. Speaking about object storage, S3 over RDMA was a topic as well. It confirms that SDS still is alive if some people have some doubt about it. Nvidia GDS was hot and we saw a few speaking about SCADA.

On the data management aspect, several players secured a both like Arcitecta, Globus, PoINT Software and Systems, QStar, Spectra Logic, Starfish, Versity, Rubrik or Atempo and Bacula. We didn’t see Komprise this year.

On the media side, flash and SSD have been everywhere with Dapustor, Micron, Phison, Sandisk, Solidigm, SK hynix, Nimbus Data but also Seagate and WDC and their respective partners. Samsung was absent. Memory occupied obviously some space with HBM being at the heart of several solutions. Tape libraries players had a presence, IBM, Qualstar, Quantum and Spectra Logic with their own booth, plus some products visible at partners booths such as IBM Diamondback at the ATTO one or BDT on the PoINT place. As LTO-10 got a recent refresh ith 40TB tape capacity, it was interesting to see some dynamics around these secondary storage solutions. On this topic, the Active Archive Alliance organized its famous cocktail where dedicated actors meet. Graid Technology also was there as they confirmed the deal with Intel about VROC.

Such an event is also the opportunity for exhibitors, and others, to announce new products, initiatives and partnerships. Among the ton of them, we select a few:

Again a superb 2025 conference. SC26 will take place in Chicago, IL, from November 15 to 20, 2026. See you there.