ParTec Expands Supercomputer Patent Fight From Microsoft To Nvidia

German HPC vendor ParTec is taking legal action against Nvidia for alleged patent infringement, seeking an injunction to stop its GPUs being sold in 18 countries that are participants in the Europe-wide unitary patent system.

ParTec - involved in the Jupiter project to build Europe's first exascale system plus other supercomputers such as MareNostrum5 at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center - confirmed this morning in a statement to the Frankfurt Stock Exchange (auf Deutsch) that the patents in question are European versions of those cited in its US legal case against Microsoft filed in June.

That case centers on patents relating to the company'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. ParTec claims Microsoft has infringed on this intellectual property in building its cloud-based Azure AI platform.

The action against Nvidia was filed at the Unified Patent Court (UPC) in Munich on October 27, jointly with BF exaQC AG which is "the exclusive licensee and licensing agent of ParTec AG for its patent portfolio."

ParTec says it is seeking an injunction that would block Nvidia from distributing "essential products" of its GPU portfolio in countries in Europe covered by the patents. It is also asking for damages.

According to the ip fray blog from anti-software patent campaigner Florian Mueller, the two patents in question 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, and so is enforceable in all EU member states that are part of the Unitary Patent System. This currently runs to 18 countries, including the big economies of Germany, France and Italy, and so a successful injunction would prevent any product of Nvidia's judged to be infringing from being sold across most of the EU.

Patent EP'812 was deemed novel and inventive over the prior art in a previous challenge, according to ip fray, which adds: "In that regard, it's a strong and battle-tested patent."

However, we suspect this action is simply a way of forcing Nvidia to open talks with ParTec about licensing, as a block on those GPUs in Europe would likely affect progress on the very supercomputer projects that ParTec is involved with.

ParTec itself posted some background to the case on its website. It says the company was founded in 1999 as a spin-off from the University of Karlsruhe, has been heavily involved in the development of middleware for supercomputers, and its ParaStation Modulo is used in many European systems.

The company claims it foresaw that supercomputer designs would eventually hit a roadblock as engineers try to scale to meet increasing demands for compute capacity, and this led to its development of dMSA.

ParTec also says it realized early on that accelerators such as GPUs would play "a very special role," and it sought and conducted "intensive cooperation talks" with Nvidia, during which it showed off its modular architecture, the ParaStation software, and detailed key patents, copies of which were provided.

In particular, there was a meeting in 2019 in California, where Nvidia expressed "keen interest" in ParTec's technologies and declared a willingness to develop supercomputers together based on the ParaStation software, ParTec claims.

Nvidia did not subsequently follow up on its offer to collaborate, however, a "good cooperation" emerged between the two in building various supercomputers as Nvidia established itself as the "supplier of choice" for datacenter GPUs.

ParTec says the lawsuit "became unavoidable" as Nvidia refused to enter discussions with it about the supply of GPU products, claiming that a letter from its CEO to Nvidia chief Jensen Huang went unanswered.

Nvidia has justified its refusal to discuss the matter by pointing out that ParTec was suing Microsoft, one of Nvidia's biggest customers, for infringement of the patents in this case.

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• A closer look at Intel and AMD's different approaches to gluing together CPUs

This, of course, is all ParTec's view of the situation: we asked Nvidia for its side of the dispute and it refused to comment.

Munich-based ParTec concludes by claiming: "With ParTec's technology and architecture, Germany and Europe have the opportunity to build their own sovereign industry."

As it stands, however, ParTec aleges 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." This, it adds, represents a threat to Germany and Europe's compute industry. ®