After a decade of vendor consolidation that saw some of the world’s biggest IT firms acquire first-class HPC providers such as SGI, Cray, and Sun Microsystems, as well as smaller players like Penguin Computing, WhamCloud, Appro, and Isilon, it is natural to wonder who is next. …
HPC In 2020: Acquisitions And Mergers As The New Normal was written by Michael Feldman at The Next Platform.
Intel has spent more than three decades evolving from the dominant provider of CPUs for personal computers to the dominant supplier of processors for servers in the datacenter. …
Covering All The Compute Bases In A Heterogeneous Datacenter was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
You don’t have to be a chip designer to program an FPGA, just like you don’t have to be a C++ programmer to code in Java, but it probably helps in both cases if you want to do them well. …
The Inevitability Of FPGAs In The Datacenter was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Weather forecasting in Europe is going to get a big boost later this year when the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) installs its next-generation supercomputer. …
European Weather Center Breaks Tradition With Upcoming Supercomputer was written by Michael Feldman at The Next Platform.
Sometimes markets need a particular technology and they are impatient for it, and sometimes technologies get ahead of the immediate needs of customers and their creators have to hang on until the time is right. …
On The Spearpoint Of FPGA And The Cloud was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
The choice of processors available for high performance computing has been on growing for a number of years. …
HPC In 2020: Compute Engine Diversity Gets Real was written by Michael Feldman at The Next Platform.
Best of breed and vertical integration are two opposing forces that have been part of the datacenter since mainframes first fired up six decades ago in a room with a glass windows in it so companies could show off their technical prowess and financial might. …
Vertical Integration Is Eating The Datacenter, Part One was written by Paul Teich at The Next Platform.
Things get a little wonky at exascale and hyperscale. Things that don’t matter quite as much at enterprise scale, such as the cost or the performance per watt or the performance per dollar per watt for a system or a cluster, end up dominating the buying decisions. …
The Supercomputing Efficiency Curve Bends In The Right Direction was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
At every key leap in processing capacity in high performance computing – and just rattling off more than two decades from teraflops through petaflops, and now on the verge of exaflops in two years or so – there has been this tension between custom-built systems that break through performance barriers and more general purpose machines based on more off of the shelf components that cost less and tend to be fast followers. …
Doing The Math On Fractal HPC was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
We have been waiting for a long, long time for the ionic bond between compute and main memory to be softened to something a little more covalent and therefore allow for more complex storage structures to be formed within systems and across them. …
Gen-Z Memory Servers Loom On The Horizon was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
If we could sum up the near-term future of high performance computing in a single phrase, it would be more of the same and then some. …
HPC In 2020: AI Is No Longer An Experiment was written by Michael Feldman at The Next Platform.
One of the benefits of the public cloud is that it allows HPC centers to experiment and push the limits of scalability in a way they could never do if they had to requisition, budget, and install machinery on premises. …
Urgent HPC Can Burst Affordably To The Cloud was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Toward the end of 2019, a flurry of announcements by some of the most prominent IT companies suggests that collaborations will become increasingly important in the quantum computing space as the players jockey for position in the nascent market. …
Quantum Computing Providers Pick Their Dance Partners was written by Michael Feldman at The Next Platform.
A system is more than its central processor, and perhaps at no time in history has this ever been true than right now. …
Intel Declares A Truce Before Bus Wars Flare Up was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
When many think of the Internet of Things (IoT) and connected vehicles from a compute perspective, the first thing that springs to mind is likely the small processors that are hard at work sensing, analyzing, and feeding data to remote systems. …
How HPC, AI, and IoT Drive the Future of Smarter Vehicles was written by Nicole Hemsoth at The Next Platform.
There are at least two – and possibly more – paths to make Arm processors competitive with the Intel and now AMD X86 incumbent processors in the datacenter. …
The Other Way To Bring Arm CPUs To Servers was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
The European Commission has anted up €3.9 million to create a set of tools and runtime frameworks that will be used to support the exascale supercomputers to be deployed across the continent in the coming decade. …
A European Dialect For Exascale Programming was written by Michael Feldman at The Next Platform.
Like their US-based counterparts, Google and Amazon, the Chinese Internet giants Baidu and Alibaba rely on GPU acceleration to drive critical parts of their AI-based services. …
AI Recommendation Systems Get A GPU Makeover was written by Michael Feldman at The Next Platform.
With the dividing line between switching and routing blurring among the hyperscalers and cloud builders, it is no wonder to us that switching is growing as Ethernet switch ASICs get more and more routing functions and true Ethernet routing has remained more or less flat in the past five years. …
Routing Boosts Switching As The Lines Between Them Blur was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
Intel has made another big move toward its ambition to dominate the artificial intelligence space in the datacenter, acquiring Israeli AI chipmaker Habana Labs for $2 billion. …
Intel Hedges Its AI Bets With Habana Labs Buy was written by Michael Feldman at The Next Platform.