Microsoft is facing legal action from German HPC vendor ParTec over claims of patent infringement relating to technology used in putting together AI supercomputers.

Munich-based ParTec is involved in a number of European supercomputer projects, including Jupiter, set to be the EU’s first exascale system, and the Leonardo supercomputer in Bologna.

The company and its licensing agent, BF exaQC AG, say they hold about 150 patents, with the most important relating to what ParTec calls its dynamic modular system architecture (dMSA), which is at the heart of this patent case.

In the lawsuit [PDF] filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, on Monday, ParTec asserts that Microsoft has infringed on its patents, such as that relating to dMSA, in building out its cloud-based Azure AI platform. The company is seeking an injunction against the use of what it alleges is its patented technology as well as license fees and compensation for damages.

"Microsoft is infringing our intellectual property with its wave of AI supercomputers as part of their cloud computing platform Azure. We have therefore decided to file a lawsuit in Texas, USA," ParTec CEO Bernhard Frohwitter declared in a statement.

Frohwitter is also CEO of the company's licensing agent, BF exaQC, or BFX. It has "the exclusive right to license the patents to third parties and enforce the Asserted Patents," according to the court filing.

The patents in question are US numbers 10,142,156 ('156), 11,934,883 ('883) and 11,537,442 ('442).

That '156 patent is said to be the one relating to ParTec's dMSA, but is simply titled "Computer cluster arrangement for processing a computation task and method for operation thereof," and was granted on November 27, 2018.

Next, the '883 patent is described as "a continuation of the application that resulted in the '156 patent," and was granted only recently - March 19, 2024.

The '442 patent is entitled "Application Runtime Determined Dynamical Allocation of Heterogenous Compute Resources," essentially a method for allocating computational tasks to different compute nodes and booster nodes in a supercomputer. This was granted on December 27, 2022.

ParTec's court filing* states that the company's patents revolve around dynamic resource management, so that compute tasks are assigned dynamically throughout compute clusters to help increase utilization and maximize compute speed.

It goes on to claim that before the inventions described in its patents, general purpose processors were paired with permanently assigned accelerators, but this arrangement typically results in over or under-allocation of resources.

ParTec claims its solution was a modular computing system that combines processing units and accelerators, but makes them freely and dynamically assignable to each other.

The court filing then details Microsoft's Azure AI system and Azure AI infrastructure, citing the Redmond giant's own descriptions of it as a "specialized hardware and software stack that can support the efficient running [of] models of . . .massive scale," and that it comprises "a full technology stack with CPUs, GPUs, DPUs, systems, [and] networking."

When it comes to the specific claims of infringement, ParTec again cites Microsoft’s own description that Azure AI has "a plurality of hardware computation nodes", "a plurality of hardware boosters", and "a resource manager" to assign hardware boosters to the computation nodes.

In fact, the court filing cites pages and pages of descriptions of Microsoft's Azure AI platform in an attempt to demonstrate that the descriptions of its capabilities match the descriptions of its patents.

ParTec is asking for a jury trial, so it will be up to the jurors to decide if this is enough to rule that Microsoft has infringed on the company's patents.

We asked Microsoft for comment.

However, intellectual property activist and consultant Florian Mueller has already hit out at the action, writing on the ip fray blog: "It's clear that ParTec's lawsuit against Microsoft will not be the last of its kind unless others enter into license agreements or the patents are invalidated (or narrowed to an extent that would defang them)." ®

*ParTec's court filing cites an article by our colleagues over at The Next Platform: "Inside the Infrastructure that Microsoft Builds to Run AI." We're not sure whether to feel proud or not.

https://www.theregister.com//2024/06/12/microsoft_sued_by_partec/