There has been much written about the potential for FPGAs to take a leadership role in accelerating deep learning but in practice, the hurdles of getting from concept to high performance hardware design are still taller than many AI shops are willing to scale, particularly when GPUs dominate in training and in a pinch, standard CPUs will do just fine for datacenter inference since they involve little developer overhead. …
Intel FPGA Architecture Focuses on Deep Learning Inference was written by Nicole Hemsoth at .
If the world doesn’t need another thing, one of those things that it doesn’t need is probably another switch operating system. …
Why The World Needs Another Network Operating System was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .
It has taken time and a lot of changes in the industry, but HPC in the cloud might actually be something that can work not just technically, but as a business model that is reasonable and sustainable. …
Rescaling to Meet the Needs of HPC Cloud was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .
Despite the increasing competitive pressures that Intel is feeling in the datacenter and very serious issues that the company is having ramping up its 10 nanometer manufacturing processes, the datacenter business at Intel were booming in the second quarter, helping to drive a record second quarter and what is looking like will be a record full year for the chip maker. …
Intel Makes Money Hand Over Fist In The Datacenter was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .
To a certain extent, the “Knights” family of parallel processors, sold under the brand name Xeon Phi, by Intel were exactly what they were supposed to be: A non-mainstream product that tried out a different architecture than its mainstream Xeon family of server processors and that was aimed at the high performance computing jet set that is, by definition, supposed to take risks on new architectures. …
The End Of Xeon Phi – It’s Xeon And Maybe GPUs From Here was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .
Enterprises that want to leverage the huge amounts of data they are generating to gain useful insights and make faster and better business decisions are going to have to use machine learning at scale for modeling and training. …
Bringing Machine Learning Within Reach Of Enterprises was written by Jeffrey Burt at .
Researchers for centuries have relied on observational and theoretical astronomy for studying the stars, using telescopes and mathematical calculations to view planets and other objects, determine how they relate to each other, delve into mysteries like black holes and dark matter, and put into perspective the Earth’s place in the universe. …
Cray XC50 Accelerates Astrophysics In Japan was written by Jeffrey Burt at .
Imagine, if you will, that your two biggest rivals were Intel and Nvidia, and that you had to fight a two front war to storm the datacenter. …
Getting All Zen About AMD’s Datacenter Business was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .
This morning at Google Next computer architecture pioneers, John Hennessey and David Patterson, remarked that even though it could be revolutionary, quantum computing is still at least a decade away. …
Fault Tolerance at Heart of Google’s Quantum Strategy was written by Nicole Hemsoth at .
If there is anything the hyperscalers have taught us, it is the value of homogeneity and scale in an enterprise. …
The Many Machine Learning Engines Of Google was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .
As the rubber begins to meet the road for quantum computing, the conversation is shifting from one about the practicality of hardware to how future users will interface with quantum systems. …
Toward Open, Extensible Quantum Programming was written by Nicole Hemsoth at .
As the underdog in cloud computing, Google has to take a slightly different tack from industry pioneer and juggernaut Amazon Web Services, which simply believes that all applications should, in the fullness of time, move to the public cloud. …
Google Takes On Public Cloud Rivals With Private Kubernetes Service was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .
Despite some of the inherent complexities of using FPGAs for implementing deep neural networks, there is a strong efficiency case for using reprogrammable devices for both training and inference. …
Clearing the TensorFlow to FPGA Path was written by Nicole Hemsoth at .
When it comes to building extreme scale computing platforms, there are plenty of system design options but in supercomputing, the only practical choice for an OS is Linux. …
Replacing Linux with a Database System was written by Nicole Hemsoth at .
Quantum systems will not replace traditional supercomputers anytime soon but for certain types of simulations, they will be far more efficient and scalable than classical machines, at least according to CEO of quantum computer maker D-Wave, Vern Brownell. …
D-Wave CEO on Future of Quantum Simulations was written by Nicole Hemsoth at .
Mellanox got its start as one of the several suppliers of ASICs for the low latency InfiniBand protocol that was originally conceived as a kind of universal fabric to connect all devices in the datacenter. …
Steady InfiniBand, Booming Ethernet Propel Mellanox Higher was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .
This year at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) Dr. Keren Bergman from the Lightwave Research Lab at Columbia University detailed the road ahead for optical interconnects in supercomputing and what it means for exascale energy efficiency and beyond. …
Efficiency Gains of Optical Interconnects at Exascale was written by Nicole Hemsoth at .
Given the rollout of the “ZZ” and “Boston” variants of its Power9 systems, which are aimed at customers who are building clusters and at midrange enterprises that use a Power System server as their main back-end system, you might be expecting for the Power Systems line at IBM to have had a big bump in the second quarter of this year. …
Awaiting IBM’s Power Systems Growth Spurt was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at .
There is no way to predict which quantum system will garner system share in the next years, but most large chip, system, and software companies are hedging their bets and establishing a quantum research effort in the form of hardware, simulations, or software stacks. …
Microsoft Builds Quantum Strategy Around Q# was written by Nicole Hemsoth at .
FPGA maker Xilinx has acquired Chinese deep learning chip startup DeePhi Tech for an undisclosed sum. …
FPGA Maker Snaps Up Deep Learning Chip Startup was written by Nicole Hemsoth at .