Even though the Xeon processor has become the default engine for most kinds of compute in the datacenter, it is by no means to only option that is available to large enterprises that can afford to indulge in different kinds of systems because they do not have to homogenize their systems as hyperscalers must if they are to keep their IT costs in check.
Sometimes, there are benefits to being smaller, and the ability to pick point solutions that are good for a specific job is one of them. This has been the hallmark of the high-end of computing since …
Stacking Up Oracle S7 Against Intel Xeon was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Big Blue does not participate in any meaningful sense in the booming market for infrastructure for the massive hyperscale and public cloud buildout that is transforming the face of the IT business. But the company is still a bellwether for computing at large enterprises, and its efforts to – once again – transform itself to address the very different needs that companies have compared to a decade or two ago are fascinating to contemplate.
In a very real way, the manner that IBM talks about its own business these days, which is very different from how it described the rising …
Systems Are The Table Stakes For IBM’s Evolution was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Dell recently unveiled its datacenter liquid cooling technology under the codename of Triton. Dell’s Extreme Scale Infrastructure team originally designed and developed Triton as a proof of concept for eBay, leveraging Dell’s existing rack-scale infrastructure.
In addition to liquid-cooled cold plates that directly contact the CPUs, Triton is also designed with embedded liquid to air heat exchangers to cool the airborne heat of a large number of tightly packed and hot processor nodes using 80% of the cooling capacity of the heat exchangers. That leaves 20% of Triton’s cooling capacity as “overhead”. The overhead cooling capacity is then used to …
HPC Flows Into Hyperscale With Dell Triton was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
For the first time access to cutting-edge quantum computing is open free to the public over the web. On 3 May 2016, IBM launched their IBM Quantum Experience website, which enthusiasts and professionals alike can program on a prototype quantum processor chip within a simulation environment. Users, accepted over email by IBM, are given a straightforward ‘composer’ interface, much like a musical note chart, to run a program and test the output. In over a month more than 25,000 users have signed up.
The quantum chip itself combines five superconducting quantum bits (qubits) operating at a cool minus 273.135531 degrees …
IBM Quantum Computing Push Gathering Steam was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
In the first part of this series on the proposed Cache Coherence Interconnect for Accelerators (CCIX) standard, we talked about the issues of cache coherence and the need to share memory across various kinds of compute elements in a system. In this second part, we will go deeper into the approach of providing memory coherence across CPUs and various kinds of accelerators that have their own local memory.
A local accelerator could potentially be anything. You want something to execute faster than what is possible in today’s generic processors, and so you throw specialized hardware at the problem. Still, …
Weaving Accelerators Into The Memory Complex was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
With the increasing adoption of scale-out architectures and cloud computing, high performance interconnect (HPI) technologies have become a more critical part of IT systems. Today, HPI represents its own market segment at the upper echelons of the networking equipment market, supporting applications requiring extremely low latency and exceptionally high bandwidth.
As big data analytics, machine learning, and business optimization applications become more prevalent, HPI technologies are of increasing importance for enterprises as well. These most demanding enterprise applications, as well as high performance computing (HPC) applications, are generally addressed with scale-out clusters based on large numbers of ‘skinny’ nodes. The …
Ranking High Performance Interconnects was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
MPI (Message Passing Interface) is the de facto standard distributed communications framework for scientific and commercial parallel distributed computing. The Intel MPI implementation is a core technology in the Intel Scalable System Framework that provides programmers a “drop-in” MPICH replacement library that can deliver the performance benefits of the Intel Omni-Path Architecture (Intel OPA ) communications fabric plus high core count Intel Xeon and Intel Xeon Phi processors.
“Drop-in” literally means that programmers can set an environmental variable to dynamically load the highly tuned and optimized Intel MPI library – no recompilation required! Of course, Intel’s MPI library supports other …
MPI and Scalable Distributed Machine Learning was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
The past decade or so has seen some really phenomenal capacity growth and similarly remarkable software technology in support of distributed-memory systems. When work can be spread out across a lot of processors and/or a lot of disjointed memory, life has been good.
Pity, though, that poor application needing access to a lot of shared memory or which could use the specialized and so faster resources of local accelerators. For such, distributed memory just does not cut it and having to send work out to an IO-attached accelerator chews into much of what would otherwise be an accelerator’s advantages. With …
Drilling Into The CCIX Coherence Standard was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
With the general availability of the “Knights Landing” Xeon Phi many core processors from Intel last month, some of the largest supercomputing labs on the planet are getting their first taste of what the future style of high performance computing could look like for the rest of us.
We are not suggesting that the Xeon Phi processor will be the only compute engine that will be deployed to run traditional simulation and modeling applications as well as data analytics, graph processing, and deep learning algorithms. But we are suggesting that this style of compute engine – it is more than …
Knights Landing Will Waterfall Down From On High was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Close to a year ago when more information was becoming available about the Knights Landing processor, Intel released projections for its relative performance against two-socket Haswell machines. As one might image, the performance improvements were impressive, but now that there are systems on the ground that can be optimized and benchmarked, we are finally getting a more boots-on-the-ground view into the performance bump.
As it turns out, optimization and benchmarking on the “Cori” supercomputer at NERSC are showing that those figures were right on target. In a conversation with one of the co-authors of a new report highlighting the optimization …
Optimization Tests Confirm Knights Landing Performance Projections was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
Before any country can deploy an exascale system, they have to get pre-exascale prototypes into the field to test out their underlying technologies and determine what approaches have the best chance of scaling up performance and being manufactured affordably. It looks like China is looking at three different pre-exascale systems, and none of them will deploy processors or accelerators made by US companies.
It is no secret that China has wanted to develop an indigenous capability to design chips and build supercomputer-class systems, and this was true even before the US government put the kibosh on selling Intel Xeon and …
China’s Triple Play For Pre-Exascale Systems was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Any time a ranking of a technology is put together, that ranking is always called into question as to whether or not it is representative of reality. Rankings, such as the Top 500 list of the top supercomputers in the world, has been the subject of such debate with regards to the Linpack Fortran performance benchmark that is used to create the rankings and its relevance to the performance of actual workloads. When it comes to networking, the changes in the list in recent years are likely a better reflection of what is going on in high performance computing in …
Competition Heats Up In Cluster Interconnects was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
As we are carefully watching here, there is a perfect storm brewing in the semiconductor space, both for manufacturers and system designers.
On the one hand, the impending demise of Moore’s Law presents a set of challenges—and opportunities—for emerging chip companies to arise and offer alternatives, often with customization cooked into the business model. And for end users, there is a rising tide of options that might lift a lot of boats if ecosystems are rapidly adopted. This is the case in the ARM space, as we’ve seen clearly this year, as well as for other architectures, including efforts from …
Startup Takes a Risk on RISC-V Custom Silicon was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
As supercomputing centers look to future exascale systems, among the other pressing concerns (power consumption in particular) is adopting the right programming approach to scale applications across millions of cores.
And while this might sound like a big enough challenge on its own, it gets more complicated because it might just be that a new programming model (or system) might not be the scalability and performance answer either. It could just be that tweaking existing tools and methods can move programming evolution to programming revolution, that is, of course, if the supercomputing programmer community can agree.
Like all things in …
Supercomputing’s Scramble to Keep Thinking in Parallel was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
IBM has created a virtual hackathon for all you lovely developers to test drive your data-intensive applications on the OpenPOWER server, GPU and accelerator platform. And there’s $27,000 worth of prizes on the table. Want to give it a go? Check out the competition rules and register for the OpenPOWER Developer Challenge.
The closing deadline is September 1 and already 277 individuals have signed up. So don’t dilly dally: tear down those hardware performance barriers and submit your entry. Choose which track is the one for you and connect with the experts ‘round the clock on Slack to get …
OpenPower Developers Primed for Big Wins at IBM Hackathon was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
Sometimes, it seems that people are of two minds about high performance computing. They want it to be special and distinct from the rest of the broader IT market, and at the same time they want the distributed simulation and modeling workloads that have for decades been the most exotic things around to be so heavily democratized that they become pervasive. Democratized. Normal.
We are probably a few years off from HPC reaching this status, but this is one of the goals that the new HPC team at Dell has firmly in mind as the world’s second largest system maker …
When HPC Becomes Normal was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
If money was no object, then arguably the major nations of the world that always invest heavily in supercomputing would have already put an exascale class system into the field. But money always matters and ultimately supercomputers have to justify their very existence by enabling scientific breakthroughs and enhancing national security.
This, perhaps, is why the Exascale Computing Project establish by the US government last summer is taking such a measured pace in fostering the technologies that will ultimately result in bringing three exascale-class systems with two different architectures into the field after the turn of the next decade. The …
Stretching Software Across Future Exascale Systems was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
The supercomputing industry is as insatiable as it is dreamy. We have not even reached our ambitions of hitting the exascale level of performance in a single system by the end of this decade, and we are stretching our vision out to the far future and wondering how the capacity of our largest machines will scale by many orders of magnitude more.
Dreaming is the foundation of the technology industry, and supercomputing has always been where the most REM action takes place among the best and brightest minds in computing, storage, and networking – as it should be. But to …
Dreaming Of 100 Exaflops In 2030 was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
As supercomputers expand in terms of processing, storage, and network capabilities, the size and scope of simulations is also expanding outward. While this is great news for scientific progress, this naturally creates some new bottlenecks, particularly on the analysis and visualization fronts.
Historically, most large-scale simulations would dump time step and other data at defined intervals onto disk for post-processing and visualization, but as the petabyte scale of that process adds more weight, that is becoming less practical. Further, for those who know what they want to find in that data, using an in situ approach to finding the answer …
In Situ Analysis to Push Supercomputing Efficiency was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
As the world is now aware, China is now home to the world’s most powerful supercomputer, toppling the previous reigning system, Tianhe-2, which is also located in the country.
In the wake of the news, we took an in-depth look at the architecture of the new Sunway TiahuLight machine, which will be useful background as we examine a few of the practical applications that have been ported to and are now running on the 10 million-core, 125 petaflop-capable supercomputer.
The sheer size and scale of the system is what initially grabbed headlines when we broke news about the system last …
Inside Look at Key Applications on China’s New Top Supercomputer was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.