Wanted: A Complete – And Heavily Customizable – HPC Software Stack

Sponsored Feature. There are a lot of things that the HPC centers and hyperscalers of the world have in common, and one of them is their attitudes about software. …

Wanted: A Complete – And Heavily Customizable – HPC Software Stack was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

PSC Upgrades Neocortex AI Supercomputer With New Cerebras Engines

If you were going to build an electronic brain in 2022, it might look something like the Neocortex supercomputer at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center at Carnegie Mellon University. …

PSC Upgrades Neocortex AI Supercomputer With New Cerebras Engines was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

With Aquila, Google Abandons Ethernet To Outdo InfiniBand

Frustrated by the limitations of Ethernet, Google has taken the best ideas from InfiniBand and Cray’s “Aries” interconnect and created a new distributed switching architecture called Aquila and a new GNet protocol stack that delivers the kind of consistent and low latency that the search engine giant has been seeking for decades. …

With Aquila, Google Abandons Ethernet To Outdo InfiniBand was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Expanding DevOps With Infrastructure As Code

The hyperscalers have taught us many lessons in the past two decades, and one of them is that everything that can be defined in software should be so that it can be controlled automatically and programmatically – and that goes double for hardware, which has required so much human babysitting over the decades. …

Expanding DevOps With Infrastructure As Code was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Stacking Up L2 Cache, RIKEN Shows 10X Speedup For A64FX By 2028

Let the era of 3D V-Cache in HPC begin.

Inspired by the idea of AMD’s “Milan-X” Epyc 7003 processors with their 3D V-Cache stacked L3 cache memory and then propelled by actual benchmark tests pitting regular Milan CPUs against Milan-X processors using real-world and synthetic HPC applications, researchers at RIKEN Lab in Japan, where the “Fugaku” supercomputer based on Fujitsu’s impressive A64FX vectorized Arm server chip, have fired up a simulation of a hypothetical A64FX follow-on that could, in theory, be built in 2028 and provide nearly an order of magnitude more performance than the current A64FX. …

Stacking Up L2 Cache, RIKEN Shows 10X Speedup For A64FX By 2028 was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The HBM3 Roadmap Is Just Getting Started

To a certain extent, the only thing that really matters in a computing system is what changes in its memory, and to that extent, this is what makes computers like us. …

The HBM3 Roadmap Is Just Getting Started was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Looming Arm Server Battle Between AWS And Microsoft

Wouldn’t it be funny if Google ends up being the stalwart supporter of the X86 architecture among the hyperscalers and cloud builders? …

The Looming Arm Server Battle Between AWS And Microsoft was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Spectrum-4 Ethernet Leaps To 800G With Nvidia Circuits

When Nvidia announced a deal to buy Mellanox Technologies for $6.9 billion in March 2019, everyone spent a lot of time thinking about the synergies between the two companies and how networking was going to become an increasingly important part of the distributed systems that run HPC and AI workloads. …

Spectrum-4 Ethernet Leaps To 800G With Nvidia Circuits was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Deep Dive Into Nvidia’s “Hopper” GPU Architecture

With each passing generation of GPU accelerator engines from Nvidia, machine learning drives more and more of the architectural choices and changes and traditional HPC simulation and modeling drives less and less. …

Deep Dive Into Nvidia’s “Hopper” GPU Architecture was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Mass Customization Wave Is Starting For Servers

Remember when only a couple of variations of processors were available for servers in any given generation of server CPUs? …

The Mass Customization Wave Is Starting For Servers was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Early Frontier Supercomputer Tests Show Decent Performance Leaps

It is the nature of capability class supercomputers to try to push the envelope on as many different architectural fronts as possible. …

Early Frontier Supercomputer Tests Show Decent Performance Leaps was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Nvidia Embraces The CPU World With “Grace” Arm Server Chip

Within a year or so, with the launch of the “Grace” Arm server CPUs, it will not be heresy for anyone at Nvidia to believe, or to say out loud, that not every workload in the datacenter needs to have GPU acceleration. …

Nvidia Embraces The CPU World With “Grace” Arm Server Chip was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

The Buck Still Stops Here For GPU Compute

It has taken untold thousands of people to make machine learning, and specifically the deep learning variety, the most viable form of artificial intelligence. …

The Buck Still Stops Here For GPU Compute was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Nvidia Will Be A Prime Contractor For Big AI Supercomputers

Normally, when we look at a system, we think from the compute engines at a very fine detail and then work our way out across the intricacies of the nodes and then the interconnect and software stack that scales it across the nodes into a distributed computing platform. …

Nvidia Will Be A Prime Contractor For Big AI Supercomputers was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

AMD Rounds Out “Aldebaran” GPU Lineup With Instinct MI210

When the “Aldebaran” datacenter GPUs were launched by AMD last November for the HPC and AI crowd pushing up into the exascale stratosphere, only the two top-end models of the Instinct GPU accelerators –ones that use the Open Accelerator Module (OAM) form factor put forth by Facebook and Microsoft under the Open Compute Project – were actually available. …

AMD Rounds Out “Aldebaran” GPU Lineup With Instinct MI210 was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

“Hopper” GH100 GPUs Are The Heart Of A More Expansive Nvidia System

There are a lot of things that compute engine makers have to do if they want to compete in the datacenter, but perhaps the most important thing is to be consistent. …

“Hopper” GH100 GPUs Are The Heart Of A More Expansive Nvidia System was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

“Milan-X” 3D Vertical Cache Yields Epyc HPC Bang For The Buck Boost

Last fall ahead of the SC21 supercomputing conference, AMD said it was going to be the first of the major compute engine makers to add 3D vertical L3 cache to its chips, in this case to variants of  the “Milan” Epyc 7003 series of processors that debuted in March 2021 called the “Milan-X” chips. …

“Milan-X” 3D Vertical Cache Yields Epyc HPC Bang For The Buck Boost was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Why Nvidia Should Acquire SUSE

Here we are, on the Friday before the flagship GPU Technology Conference hosted by Nvidia is set to kick off. …

Why Nvidia Should Acquire SUSE was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Liqid Launches Its Own Systems, Chases AI And HPC

To hardware or not to hardware, that is a real question for vendors peddling all kinds of software in the datacenter. …

Liqid Launches Its Own Systems, Chases AI And HPC was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Burning Cash Like Rocket Fuel To Get Hashi Stack To The Next Stage

Creating a platform is a massive technical challenge. We have seen many technically elegant ones in recent years – Cloud Foundry, Engine Yard, the original OpenShift, Photon Platform, Mesos, OpenStack come immediately to mind – that didn’t quite make it, and importantly did not rise to the economic challenge of making enough money to sustain the continued development and support of that platform to have to reach tens of thousands, to hundreds of thousands, to millions of customers. …

Burning Cash Like Rocket Fuel To Get Hashi Stack To The Next Stage was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.