AMD Researchers Eye APUs For Exascale

Exascale computing, which has been long talked about, is now – if everything remains on track – only a few years away. Billions of dollars are being spent worldwide to develop systems capable of an exaflops of computation, which is 50 times the performance of the most capacious systems the current Top500 supercomputer rankings and will usher in the next generation of HPC workloads.

As we have talked about at The Next Platform, China is pushing ahead with three projects aimed at delivering exascale systems to the market, with a prototype – dubbed the Tianhe-3 – being prepped for …

AMD Researchers Eye APUs For Exascale was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Financial Institutions Weigh Risks, Benefits of Cloud Migration

Cloud computing in its various forms is often pitched as a panacea of sorts for organizations that are looking to increase the flexibility of their data and to drive down costs associated with their IT infrastructures. And for many, the benefits are real.

By offloading many of their IT tasks – from processing increasingly large amounts of data to storing all that data – to cloud providers, companies can take the money normally spent in building out and managing their internal IT infrastructures and put it toward other important business efforts. In addition, by having their data in an easily …

Financial Institutions Weigh Risks, Benefits of Cloud Migration was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

A Glimmer of Light Against Dark Silicon

Moore’s Law has been the driving force behind computer evolution for more than five decades, fueling the relentless innovation that led to more transistors being added to increasingly smaller processors that rapidly increased the performance of computing while at the same time driving down the cost.

Fifty-plus years later, as the die continues to shrink, there are signs that Moore’s Law is getting more difficult to keep up with. For example, Intel – the keeper of the Moore’s Law flame – has pushed back the transition from 14-nanometers to 10nm by more than a year as it worked through issues …

A Glimmer of Light Against Dark Silicon was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Promises, Challenges Ahead for Near-Memory, In-Memory Processing

The idea of bringing compute and memory functions in computers closer together physically within the systems to accelerate the processing of data is not a new one.

Some two decades ago, vendors and researchers began to explore the idea of processing-in-memory (PIM), the concept of placing compute units like CPUs and GPUs closer together to help reduce to the latency and cost inherent in transferring data, and building prototypes with names like EXECUBE, IRAM, DIVA and FlexRAM. For HPC environments that relied on data-intensive applications, the idea made a lot of sense. Reduce the distance between where data was …

Promises, Challenges Ahead for Near-Memory, In-Memory Processing was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Wrapping Kubernetes Around Applications Old And New

Kubernetes, the software container management system born out of Google, has seen its popularity in the datacenter soar in recent years as datacenter admins look to gain greater control of highly distributed computing environments and to take advantage of the advantages that virtualization, containers, and other technologies offer.

Open sourced by Google three years ago, Kubernetes is derived from the Borg and Omega controllers that the search engine giant created for its own clusters and has become an important part of the management tool ecosystem that includes OpenStack, Mesos, and Docker Swarm. These all try to bring order to what …

Wrapping Kubernetes Around Applications Old And New was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Large-Scale Quantum Computing Prototype on Horizon

What supercomputers will look like in the future, post-Moore’s Law, is still a bit hazy. As exascale computing comes into focus over the next several years, system vendors, universities and government agencies are all trying to get a gauge on what will come after that. Moore’s Law, which has driven the development of computing systems for more than five decades, is coming to an end as the challenge of making smaller chips loaded with more and more features is becoming increasingly difficult to do.

While the rise of accelerators, like GPUs, FPGAs and customized ASICs, silicon photonics and faster interconnects …

Large-Scale Quantum Computing Prototype on Horizon was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Memristor Research Highlights Neuromorphic Device Future

Much of the talk around artificial intelligence these days focuses on software efforts – various algorithms and neural networks – and such hardware devices as custom ASICs for those neural networks and chips like GPUs and FPGAs that can help the development of reprogrammable systems. A vast array of well-known names in the industry – from Google and Facebook to Nvidia, Intel, IBM and Qualcomm – is pushing hard in this direction, and those and other organizations are making significant gains thanks to new AI methods as deep learning.

All of this development is happening at a time when the …

Memristor Research Highlights Neuromorphic Device Future was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Juggling Applications On Intel Knights Landing Xeon Phi Chips

Intel’s many-core “Knights Landing” Xeon Phi processor is just a glimpse of what can be expected of supercomputers in the not-so-distant future of high performance computing. As the industry continues its march to exascale computing, systems will become more complex, and evolution that will include processors that not only sport a rapidly increasing number of cores but also a broad array of on-chip resources ranging from memory to I/O. Workloads ranging from simulation and modeling applications to data analytics and deep learning algorithms are all expected to benefit from what these new systems will offer in terms of processing capabilities. …

Juggling Applications On Intel Knights Landing Xeon Phi Chips was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

ARM Gains Stronger Foothold In China With AI And IoT

China represents a huge opportunity for chip designer ARM as it looks to extend its low-power system-on-a-chip (SoC) architecture beyond the mobile and embedded devices spaces and into new areas, such as the datacenter and emerging markets like autonomous vehicles, drones and the Internet of Things. China is a massive, fast-growing market with tech companies – including such giants as Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent – looking to leverage such technologies as artificial intelligence to help expand their businesses deeper into the global market and turning to vendors like ARM that can help them fuel that growth.

ARM Holdings, which designs …

ARM Gains Stronger Foothold In China With AI And IoT was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Top Chinese Supercomputer Blazes Real-World Application Trail

China’s massive Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer sent ripples through the computing world last year when it debuted in the number-one spot on the Top500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers. Delivering 93 teraflops of performance – and a peak of more than 125,000 teraflops – the system is nearly three times faster than the second supercomputer on the list (the Tianhe-2, also a Chinese system) and dwarfs the Titan system Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a Cray-based machine that is the world’s third-fastest system, and the fastest in the United States.

However, it wasn’t only the system’s performance that garnered a lot …

Top Chinese Supercomputer Blazes Real-World Application Trail was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

Getting Down To Bare Metal On The Cloud

When you think of the public cloud, the tendency is to focus on the big ones, like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform. They’re massive, dominating the public cloud skyline with huge datacenters filled with thousands of highly virtualized servers, not to mention virtualized storage and networking. Capacity is divvied up among corporate customers that are increasingly looking to run and store their workloads on someone else’s infrastructure, hardware that they don’t have to set up, deploy, manage or maintain themselves.

But as we’ve talked about before here at The Next Platform, not all workloads run …

Getting Down To Bare Metal On The Cloud was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.