One of the reasons this year’s Supercomputing Conference (SC) is nearing attendance records has far less to do with traditional scientific HPC and much more to do with growing interest in deep learning and machine learning.
Since the supercomputing set has pioneered many of the hardware advances required for AI (and some software and programming techniques as well), it is no surprise new interest from outside HPC is filtering in.
On the subject of pioneering HPC efforts, one of the industry’s longest-standing companies, supercomputer maker Cray, is slowly but surely beginning to reap the benefits of the need for this …
Samsung Invests in Cray Supercomputer for Deep Learning Initiatives was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
Twice a year, the TOP500 project publishes a list of the 500 most powerful computer systems, aka supercomputers. The TOP500 list is widely considered to be HPC-related, and many analyze the list statistics to understand the HPC market and technology trends. As the rules of the list do not preclude non-HPC systems to be submitted and listed, various OEMs have regularly submitted non-HPC platforms to the list in order to improve their apparent market position in the HPC arena. Thus, the task of analyzing the list for HPC markets and trends has grown more complicated.
In 2007, I published an …
The TOP500 is Dead, Long Live The TOP500 was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
One of the challenges vendors are trying address when it comes to artificial intelligence is expanding the technology and its elements of machine learning and deep learning beyond the realm of hyoerscalers and some HPC centers and into the enterprise, where businesses can leverage them for such workloads as simulations, modeling, and analytics.
For the past several years, system makers have been trying to crack the code that will make it easier for mainstream enterprises to adopt and deploy traditional HPC technologies, and now they want to dovetail those efforts with the expanding AI opportunity. The difference with enterprises is …
Dell EMC Wants to Take AI Mainstream was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
Every year at the Supercomputing Conference (SC) an unofficial theme emerges. For the last two years, machine learning and deep learning were focal points; before that it was all about data-intensive computing and stretching even farther back, the potential of cloud to reshape supercomputing.
What all of these themes have in common is that they did not focus on the processor. In fact, they centered around a generalized X86 hardware environment with well-known improvement and ecosystem cadences. Come to think of it, the closest we have come to seeing the device at the center of a theme in recent years …
ARM Benchmarks Show HPC Ripe for Processor Shakeup was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
InfiniBand and Ethernet are in a game of tug of war and are pushing the bandwidth and price/performance envelopes constantly. But the one thing they cannot do is get too far out ahead of the PCI-Express bus through which network interface cards hook into processors. The 100 Gb/sec links commonly used in Ethernet and InfiniBand server adapters run up against bandwidth ceilings with two ports running on PCI-Express 3.0 slots, and it is safe to say that 200 Gb/sec speeds will really need PCI-Express 4.0 slots to have two ports share a slot.
This, more than any other factor, is …
Mellanox Poised For HDR InfiniBand Quantum Leap was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
If the hyperscalers have taught us anything, it is that more data is always better. And because of this, we have to start out by saying that we are grateful to the researchers who created and administer the Top 500 supercomputer benchmark tests for the past 25 years, creating an astonishing 50 consecutive lists ranking the most powerful machines in the world as gauged by the double precision Linpack Fortran parallel matrix math test.
This set of data stands out among a few other groups of benchmarks that have been used by the tens of thousands of organizations – academic …
Top 500 Supercomputer Rankings Losing Accuracy Despite High Precision was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Just this time last year, the projection was that by 2020, ARM processors would be chewing on twenty percent of HPC workloads. In that short span of time, the grain of salt many took with that figure has dropped with the addition of some very attractive options for supercomputing from ARM hardware makers.
Last winter, the big ARM news for HPC was mostly centered on the Mont Blanc project at the Barcelona Supercomputer Center. However, as the year unfolded, details on new projects with ARM at the core including the Post-K supercomputer in Japan and the Isambard supercomputer in the …
Cray ARMs Highest End Supercomputer with ThunderX2 was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
If GPU acceleration had not been conceived of by academics and researchers at companies like Nvidia more than a decade ago, how much richer would Intel be today? How many more datacenters would have had to be expanded or built? Would HPC have stretched to try to reach exascale, and would machine learning have fulfilled the long-sought promise of artificial intelligence, or at least something that looks like it?
These are big questions, and relevant ones, as Nvidia’s datacenter business has just broken through the $2 billion run rate barrier. With something on the order of a 10X speedup across …
Nvidia Breaks $2 Billion Datacenter Run Rate was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Much of the quantum computing hype of the last few years has centered on D-Wave, which has installed a number of functional systems and is hard at work making quantum programming more practical.
Smaller companies like Rigetti Computing are gaining traction as well, but all the while, in the background, IBM has been steadily furthering quantum computing work that kicked off at IBM Research in the mid-1970s with the introduction of the quantum information concept by Charlie Bennett.
Since those early days, IBM has hit some important milestones on the road to quantum computing, including demonstrating the first quantum …
IBM Bolsters Quantum Capability, Emphasizes Device Differentiation was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
With so many chip startups targeting the future of deep learning training and inference, one might expect it would be far easier for tech giant Hewlett Packard Enterprise to buy versus build. However, when it comes to select applications at the extreme edge (for space missions in particular), nothing in the ecosystem fits the bill.
In the context of a broader discussion about the company’s Extreme Edge program focused on space-bound systems, HPE’s Dr. Tom Bradicich, VP and GM of Servers, Converged Edge, and IoT systems, described a future chip that would be ideally suited for high performance computing under …
HPE Developing its Own Low Power “Neural Network” Chips was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
Across the HPC community, commercial firms, government labs and academic institutions are adapting their code to embrace GPU architectures. They are motivated by the faster performance and lower energy consumption provided by GPUs, and many of them are using OpenACC to annotate their code and make it GPU-friendly. The Next Platform recently interviewed one key organization to learn why it is using the OpenACC programming model to expand its computing capabilities and platform support.
If the earth was the size of a basketball, its atmosphere would be the thickness of shrink wrap. It is fragile enough that in 1960, the …
HPC Heavyweight Goes All-In On OpenACC was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Nutanix has been on a journey for well over a year to transform itself from a supplier for software for hyperconverged infrastructure to a company with a platform that allows enterprises to build private datacenter environments that give them the same kinds of tools, automation, agility, scalability and consumption options that they can find in public clouds like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
Nutanix was one of several vendors whose software helped propel the fast-growing hyperconverged infrastructure space through partnerships with such top-tier system OEMs like Dell EMC, IBM and Lenovo, and is among the last independent companies standing, …
Nutanix Expands Adds Breadth to Cloud Platform was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
It is going to be a busy week for chip maker Qualcomm as it formally jumps from smartphones to servers with its new “Amberwing” Centriq 2400 Arm server processor during the same week that it has received an unsolicited $130 billion takeover offer from sometimes rival chipmaker Broadcom.
The Centriq 2400 is the culmination of over four years of work and investment, which according to the experts in the semiconductor industry we have talked to, easily took on the order of $100 million to $125 million to make happen – remember there was a prototype as well as the …
Qualcomm’s Amberwing Arm Server Chip Finally Takes Flight was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
One of the arguments Intel officials and others have made against Arm’s push to get its silicon designs into the datacenter has been the burden it would mean for enterprises and organizations in the HPC field that would have to modify application codes to get their software to run on the Arm architecture.
For HPC organizations, that would mean moving the applications from the Intel-based and IBM systems that have dominated the space for years, a time-consuming and possibly costly process.
Arm officials over the years have acknowledged the challenge, but have noted their infrastructure’s embrace of open-source software and …
Arm Smooths the Path for Porting HPC Apps was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
Nobody likes to talk about the scope and scale of platforms than we do at The Next Platform. Almost all of the interesting frameworks for various kinds of distributed computing are open source projects, but the lack of fit and finish is a common complaint across open source software projects.
As Mark Collier, chief operating officer at the OpenStack Foundation, puts it succinctly: “Open source doesn’t have an innovation problem. It has an integration problem.”
Collier’s chief concern, as well as that of his compatriot, Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation and a former Racker – meaning …
Keeping OpenStack On The Edge, Bleeding And Otherwise was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
For several years there has been the ongoing debate about ARM and its future in the datacenter. That debate goes on, but the talk is changing.
At the beginning of the decade, ARM Holdings, the company behind the ARM chip architecture that is now owned by Japanese high-tech conglomerate Softbank, said its low-power system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs were a good alternative to Intel’s dominant Xeon and derivative processors for servers and other hardware at a time when energy efficiency in systems was becoming increasingly important.
Over the years that has been speculation about when ARM-based chips would find a foothold …
Computing Is Bigger Than The Datacenter was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
Organizations are turning to artificial intelligence and deep learning in hopes of being able to more quickly make the right business decisions, to remake their business models and become more efficient, and to improve the experience of their customers. The fast-emerging technologies will let enterprises gain more insight into the massive amounts of data they are generating and find the trends that normally would have been hidden from them. And enterprises are quickly moving in that direction.
A Gartner survey found that 59 percent of organizations are gathering information to help them build out their AI strategies, while the rest …
Easing The Pain Of Prepping Data For AI was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
The global server market is increasingly driven by the hyperscalers, and the trendsetter for all of them is Amazon Web Services. The massive company dominates the fast-growing public cloud space, outpacing rivals like Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and IBM Cloud, and is the top consumer of servers among a group of hyperscalers that are becoming the most powerful buyers of systems and new components, such as processors.
This can be seen in the numbers. According to IDC analysts, hyperscalers in the first and second quarters this year made a significant push to deploy servers, with AWS accounting for more …
New AWS Instances Sport Customized Intel Skylakes, KVM Hypervisor was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
Distributed telecommunications cloud environments offer service providers a way to more quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively deliver services to end users, but they come with their share of complexity, management headaches, integration challenges and coordinating operations among multiple cloud vendors.
In a recent survey by Juniper Networks, service providers noted that a lack of visibility into all parts of the network cloud was the most difficult challenge facing as they migrate to the cloud, and that more than half of respondents said they use two or more cloud vendors in their distributed environments, adding to the complexity and the lack …
Juniper Dons Red Hat To Ease Cloud Migration was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
When Hewlett Packard Enterprise bought supercomputer maker SGI back in August 2016 for $275 million, it had already invested years in creating its own “DragonHawk” chipset to build big memory Superdome X systems that were to be the follow-ons to its PA-RISC and Itanium Superdome systems. The Superdome X machines did not support HPE’s own VMS or HP-UX operating systems, but venerable Tandem NonStop fault tolerant distributed database platform was put on the road to Intel’s Xeon processors four years ago.
Now, HPE is making another leap, as we suspected it would, and anointing the SGI UV-300 platform as its …
HPE’s Superdome Gets An SGI NUMAlink Makeover was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.