The “Naples” Epyc server processors do not exactly present a new architecture from a new processor maker, but given the difficulties that AMD had at the tail end of the Opteron line a decade ago and its long dormancy in the server space, it is almost like AMD had to start back at the beginning to gain the trust of potential server buyers.
Luckily for AMD, and its Arm server competitors Qualcomm and Cavium, there is intense pressure from all aspects of high-end computing – internal applications and external ones at hyperscalers and some cloud builders as well as enterprises …
The Ecosystem Expands For AMD Epyc Servers was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Building the first exascale systems continues to be a high-profile endeavor, with efforts underway worldwide in the United States, the European Union, and Asia – notably China and Japan – that focus on competition between regional powers, the technologies that are going into the architectures, and the promises that these supercomputers hold for everything from research and government to business and commerce.
The Chinese government is pouring money and resources into its roadmaps for both pre-exascale and exascale systems, Japan is moving forward with Fujitsu’s Post-K system that will use processors based on the Arm architecture rather than the …
Debating The Role Of Commodity Chips In Exascale was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
Written in the productivity language Julia, the Celeste project—which aims to catalogue all of the telescope data for the stars and galaxies in in the visible universe—demonstrated the first Julia application to exceed 1 PF/s of double-precision floating-point performance (specifically 1.54 PF/s).
The project took advantage of all 9300 Intel Xeon Phi Phase II nodes on the NERSC (National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center) Cori supercomputer.
Even in HPC terms, the Celeste project is big, as it created the first comprehensive catalog of visible objects in our universe by processing 178 terabytes of SDSS (Sloan Digital …
Julia Language Delivers Petascale HPC Performance was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
Apparently, it’s Rivalry Week in the compute section of the datacenter here at The Next Platform. There are a slew of vendors ramping up their processors and their ecosystems to do battle for 2018 budget dollars, and many of them are talking up the performance and bang for the buck of their architectures.
We have just discussed the “Vulcan” variant of the ThunderX2 processor from Cavium and how that company thinks it ranks against the new “Skylake” Xeon SP processors from Intel, which made their debut in July. AMD was talking up its Epyc processors at the recent SC17 …
Intel Stacks Up Xeons Against AMD Epyc Systems was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
NVM-Express isn’t new. Development on the interface, which provides lean and mean access to non-volatile memory, first came to light a decade ago, with technical work starting two years later through a work group that comprised more than 90 tech vendors. The first NVM-Express specification came out in 2011, and now the technology is going mainstream.
How quickly and pervasively remains to be seen. NVM-Express promises significant boosts in performance to SSDs while driving down the latency, which would be a boon to HPC organizations and the wider world of enterprises as prices for SSDs continue to fall and adoption …
Assessing The Tradeoffs Of NVM-Express Storage At Scale was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
It has been two years since chip maker Cavium rolled out its ThunderX Arm server processor roadmap and gave us the first glimpse of its second-generation ThunderX2 processors. A lot has changed in that time, and Cavium is now sitting in the cat-bird seat of the Arm server market at just the moment that it is merging with rival chipmaker Marvell.
Timing is everything in this IT racket, and Cavium certainly has been fortunate in this regard.
Thanks largely to Avago Technologies buying Broadcom in May 2015 for a stunning $37 billion and then at the end of 2016 losing …
Cavium Is Truly A Contender With One-Two Arm Server Punch was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Although most recognize GE as a leading name in energy, the company has steadily built a healthcare empire over the course of decades, beginning in the 1950s in particular with its leadership in medical X-ray machines and later CT systems in the 1970s and today, with devices that touch a broad range of uses.
Much of GE Healthcare’s current medical device business is rooted in imaging hardware and software systems, including CT imaging machines and other diagnostic equipment. The company has also invested significantly in the drug discovery and production arena in recent years—something the new CEO of GE, John …
Medical Imaging Drives GPU Accelerated Deep Learning Developments was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
All the shiny and zippy hardware in the world is meaningless without software, and that software can only go mainstream if it is easy to use. It has taken Linux two decades to get enterprise features and polish, and Windows Server took as long, too. So did a raft of open source middleware applications for storing data and interfacing back-end databases and datastores with Web front ends.
Now, it is time for HPC and AI applications, and hopefully, it won’t take this long.
As readers of The Next Platform know full well, HPC applications are not new. In fact, they …
Mainstreaming HPC Codes Will Drive The Next GPU Wave was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Each year, at the ISC and SC supercomputing conference shows every year, a central focus tends to be the release of the Top500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. As we’ve noted in The Next Platform, the 25-year-old list may have some issues with it, but it still captures the imagination, with lineups of ever-more powerful systems that reflect the trend toward heterogeneity and accelerators and illustrate the growing competition between the United States and China for dominance in the HPC field, the continued strength of Japan’s supercomputing industry and the desire of European Union countries to …
Green500 Drives Power Efficiency For Exascale was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
There has been a lot of talk about taking HPC technologies mainstream, taking them out of realm of research, education and government institutions and making them available to enterprises that are being challenged by the need to manage and process the huge amounts of data being generated through the use of such compute- and storage-intensive workloads such as analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning.
At The Next Platform, we have written about the efforts by systems OEMs likes IBM, Dell EMC, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise and software makers like Microsoft and SAP to develop offerings that are cost-efficient and …
The Symmetry Of Putting Fluid Dynamics In The Cloud was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
We caught wind of the “Aurora” Vector Engine vector processor and the “Tsubasa” system from NEC that makes use of it ahead of the SC17 supercomputer conference, and revealed everything we could find out about the system and speculated a bit about how the underlying processor in the absence of real data. At the conference in Denver, NEC formally unveiled the Tsubasa system and its vector motors, and now we can tell you a bit more about them and how NEC stacks them up against CPUs and GPUs when it comes to floating point work.
Just to be consistent with …
A Deep Dive Into NEC’s Aurora Vector Engine was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise has been busy this year in the HPC space. The company in June unveiled three highly scalable systems optimized for parallel processing tasks and artificial intelligence workloads, including the first system developed from the vendor’s $275 million acquisition of supercomputer maker SGI last year. The liquid-cooled petascale HPE SGI 8600 system is based on SGI’s ICE XA architecture and is aimed at complex scientific and engineering applications. The system scales to more than 10,000 nodes and uses Nvidia’s Tesla GPU accelerators and high-speed NVLink interconnect technology.
At the same time, HPE introduced the Apollo 6000 Gen10, …
HPE Aims HPC Servers, Storage At The Enterprise was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
The enormous amount of data being generated will do companies little good if they can’t more easily gather it from multiple sources, store it, analyze it and gain important insights into it that will help them drive better business decisions. There are myriad challenges to all this, starting with the sheer amount of data that is being created. The data also is coming from many different sources, is at rest and in motion, is created on-premises, in the cloud, and at the network edge, and is ruled by different data governance policies.
For the past several years, MapR Technologies has …
MapR Gives Single View Of Big Data was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
It has taken what seems like forever, but Arm server processors are starting to get some legs just as a massive consolidation wave, driven as much by the end of Moore’s Law as by the desire to always be bigger, is undertaking the semiconductor industry. All we need is a recession and a price war in the datacenter and a lot of compute, storage, and networking incumbents could be toppled. It wouldn’t be the first time, and it will not be the last.
This is why semiconductor giant Broadcom wants to pay a stunning $130 billion to acquire sometime rival …
Marvell And Cavium Forge A Datacenter Platform was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Servers have become increasingly powerful in recent years, with more processing cores being added and accelerators like GPUs and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) being added, and the amount of data that can be processed is growing rapidly.
However, a key problem has been the enabling interconnect technologies to keep pace with server evolution. It is a challenge that last year spawned the Gen-Z Consortium, a group founded by a dozen top-tier tech vendors including Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, Dell EMC, AMD, Arm, and Cray that wanted to create the next-generation interconnect that can leverage existing tech while paving the way …
Breaking Memory Free Of Compute With Gen-Z was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
Oracle was late to the cloud game, but in recent years has moved aggressively to catch up. While still behind the top companies like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, Oracle is seeing gains in revenue and customers to its cloud environment, thanks in large part due to the hundreds of thousands of enterprise customers that use its various operating system, middleware, database, and application software.
The cloud revenue jump at Oracle is pretty steep. In a conference call discussing the most recent quarterly financial numbers, Oracle co-CEO Safra Catz noted that cloud revenue for the quarter …
Expanded Oracle Cloud Rains Down GPUs, Skylake Xeons was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
Academic centers and government agencies often design and write their own applications, but some of them and the vast majority of enterprise customers with HPC applications usually depend on third parties for their software. They also depend upon those software developers to continually enhance and scale those applications, and that means adding support for GPU accelerators. Two important ones, Gaussian and ANSYS, depend not only on GPUs, but the OpenACC programming model, to extend across more cores and therefore do more work faster.
Let’s start with Gaussian.
The way that chemicals react can be the difference between a product success …
Key Software Firms Reengineer Their Code With OpenACC was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
The market for high performance computing can be a capricious one in any short term, but in general has been growing and, at last according to some of the experts who have spent decades tracking it, is set to grow a little bit faster than the IT sector at large in the coming years.
A lot, of course, will depend on whether or not the United States, Europe, China, and Japan come through with what are expected to be substantial investments in pre-exascale and exascale systems in the next few years, and quite possibly resulting in a bumper crop of …
HPC Revenues Under Pressure, But Outlook Optimistic was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
It was 31 years ago when Alan Karp, then an IBM employee, decided to put up $100 of his own money in hopes of solving a vexing issue for him and others in the computing field. When looking at the HPC space, there were supercomputers armed with eight powerful processors and designed to run the biggest applications of the day. However, there also were people putting 1,000 wimpy chips into machines that leveraged parallelism to run workloads, a rarity at the time.
According to Amdahl’s Law in 1986, even if 95 percent of a workload runs in parallel, the speedup …
Gordon Bell Looks Out Into A Parallel World was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
The landscape of HPC storage performance measurement is littered with unrealistic expectations. While there are seemingly endless strings of benchmarks aimed at providing balanced metrics, these far too often come from the vendors themselves.
What is needed is an independent set of measurements for supercomputing storage environments that takes into account all of the many nuances of HPC (versus enterprise) setups. Of course, building such a benchmark suite is no simple task—and ranking the results is not an easy exercise either because there are a great many dependencies; differences between individual machines, networks, memory and I/O tricks in software, and …
IO-500 Goes Where No HPC Storage Metric Has Gone Before was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.