ParTec expands supercomputer patent infringement dispute to include Nvidia, alleging GPU interconnect and architecture violations.
German HPC vendor ParTec is suing Nvidia for alleged patent infringement, seeking an injunction to stop its GPUs being sold in 18 countries participating in Europe's unitary patent system. The company, involved in the Jupiter project to build Europe's first exascale system and other supercomputers including MareNostrum5 at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, filed the action at the Unified Patent Court in Munich on October 27, jointly with BF exaQC AG, described as "the exclusive licensee and licensing agent of ParTec AG for its patent portfolio." ParTec is seeking an injunction to block Nvidia from distributing "essential products" of its GPU portfolio in European countries covered by the patents, along with damages.
The case centers on patents relating to ParTec's dynamic modular system architecture (dMSA) for allocating resources such as CPUs and GPUs to each other in a supercomputer cluster as the workload requires. The patents in question are European versions of those cited in ParTec's US legal case against Microsoft filed in June. According to ip fray, the two patents are: EP2628080 ("A computer cluster arrangement for processing a computation task and method for operation thereof") filed in 2011; and EP3743812 ("Application runtime determined dynamical allocation of heterogeneous compute resources") filed in 2019. The latter has unitary effect enforceable across all EU member states in the Unitary Patent System, currently 18 countries including Germany, France, and Italy. Patent EP3743812 was previously deemed novel and inventive over prior art, making it what ip fray describes as "a strong and battle-tested patent."
ParTec, founded in 1999 as a spin-off from the University of Karlsruhe, claims it developed dMSA to address the roadblock supercomputer designs would hit as engineers attempt to scale to meet increasing compute demands. The company says it realized early that GPUs would play "a very special role" and conducted "intensive cooperation talks" with Nvidia, during which it showcased its modular architecture, ParaStation software, and detailed key patents. In particular, a 2019 meeting in California saw Nvidia express "keen interest" in ParTec's technologies and declare willingness to develop supercomputers together based on ParaStation software, ParTec claims. However, Nvidia did not follow up on this offer to collaborate, though a "good cooperation" emerged as Nvidia established itself as the "supplier of choice" for datacenter GPUs.
ParTec says the lawsuit "became unavoidable" after Nvidia refused to enter discussions about GPU product supply, with a letter from ParTec's CEO to Jensen Huang going unanswered. Nvidia justified its refusal by pointing out that ParTec is suing Microsoft, one of Nvidia's biggest customers, for infringement of the patents at issue. ParTec claims that "With ParTec's technology and architecture, Germany and Europe have the opportunity to build their own sovereign industry," and alleges that "the world is currently nearly fully dependent on the – patent-infringing – infrastructure and supercomputers of Nvidia and Microsoft in the USA and distributed outside Europe for processing artificial intelligence models," representing a threat to Germany and Europe's compute industry.