For the past five years, supercomputer maker Cray has been diligently at work not only creating a new system architecture that allows for a mix of different interconnects and compute for its future “Shasta” systems, but has also brought long-time Cray chief technology officer, Steve Scott, back into the company after two stints spent at Nvidia and Google to create a new interconnect, called “Slingshot,” that is the beating heart of the Shasta system and that signals a return of the Cray that we know and love. …
Berkeley Lab First In Line for Cray “Shasta” Supercomputers was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .
There are two key barriers to fully exploring the emerging use of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) at the scale found in data centers: capital investment for private equipment, and gaining full, unfettered access to shared equipment. …
Bringing Researchers to the Frontier of FPGA Development was written by Nicole Hemsoth at .
In one fell swoop that is going to cost Big Blue a whopping $34 billion, IBM is going to become a modern software powerhouse in the datacenter that has to be contended with in an entirely different way. …
Big Blue Dons A $34 Billion Red Hat was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .
Sometimes, you just have to be amazed by a good stroke of luck in the IT sector. …
Intel’s Data Center Group Rides A Wave Of Compute Demand was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .
IT shops are notorious when it comes to avoiding risk, and this is something that we should be grateful for because it increases the odds that this increasingly compute-dependent world keeps working. …
AMD Inches Up Server Share On The Way To Rome was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .
The rise in interest in deep learning chips for training and inference has reignited interest in how reduced precision compute can cut down on energy, bandwidth, and other constraints inherent to double-precision. …
Broader Reduced Precision HPC on Horizon was written by Nicole Hemsoth at .
It has been a long time since Europe has had indigenous suppliers of the core components that go into high performance computing systems. …
The Plan For Europe’s Homegrown Exascale HPC was written by Dan Olds at .
The data-heavy medical field has long been seen as fertile ground for artificial intelligence (AI), where machine learning and deep learning techniques could crunch through mountains of data to drive everything from research to personalized medicine. …
GPU And Genomics Heavyweights Team On AI for Healthcare was written by Jeffrey Burt at .
Recognizing that the most important application of machine learning in HPC is to replace production numerical simulation models with machine learning approximations, one European organization is pushing these frontiers with innovative AI HPC research. …
Transforming HPC Research with AI Approaches was written by Nicole Hemsoth at .
The appetite for network bandwidth is insatiable, as is that of compute and storage, but our enthusiasm to acquire larger and larger chunks of all of these things is curtailed significantly by cost. …
The 400G Ethernet Ramp About Radix As Much As Bandwidth was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .
There are only so many quantum hardware architectures available but as that number grows, the need to understand which processor is best for specific quantum algorithms will be more pressing. …
Why Large-Scale Quantum Simulators Matter was written by Nicole Hemsoth at .
Enterprises are looking at a future of multiple clouds and hybrid clouds where they can run not only their new cloud-native applications but also migrate many of their legacy workloads and take advantage of cost savings and the agility that comes with cloud computing. …
Spanning The Clouds, Public And Private, With The Kubernetes Stack was written by Jeffrey Burt at .
It is hard to say for sure, but there is probably as much aggregate computing capacity in the academic supercomputing centers of the world as there are in the big national labs. …
Great Lakes Super To Remove Islands Of Compute was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .
In the early days of artificial intelligence, Hans Moravec asserted what became known as Moravec’s paradox: “It is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult-level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility.”
This assertion is now unraveling primarily due to the ascent of deep learning. …
Deep Learning Is Coming Of Age was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .
When you look at IBM, it is as if you are seeing many different instantiations of Big Blue across time playing out in the present, side by side. …
Someone Has To Pay To Push The Bleeding Edge Of Systems was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .
Ever since the “Aurora” vector processor designed by NEC was launched last year, we have been wondering if it might be used as a tool to accelerate workloads other than the traditional HPC simulation and modeling jobs that are based on crunching numbers in single and double precision floating point. …
Hadoop And Spark Get A Vector Performance Boost was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .
The gap between processor architectures in the datacenter server and on the desktop or on our laps or now in our hands thanks to transistor shrinks over the past decade is getting bigger. …
A New Datacenter Compels Arm To Create A New Chip Line was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .
The growth of a new technology as it enters the industry can tend to take on a certain pattern. …
Red Hat Flexes CoreOS Muscle In OpenShift Kubernetes Platform was written by Jeffrey Burt at .
There are an increasing number of ways to do machine learning inference in the datacenter, but one of the increasingly popular means of running inference workloads is the combination of traditional CPUs acting as a host for FPGAs that run the bulk of the inferring. …
Where The FPGA Hits The Server Road For Inference Acceleration was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .
There is a battle heating up in the datacenter, and there are tens of billions of dollars at stake as chip makers chase the burgeoning market for engines that do machine learning inference. …
Teasing Out The Bang For The Buck Of Inference Engines was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .