As we head toward the annual Supercomputing Conference season we wanted to take a moment for a level-set on exascale. There has been much talk about reaching this pinnacle over the last several years and while plenty of centers say they have reached exascale, that is only for single-precision peak …
Air is an absolutely terrible medium with which to move or remove heat from a system, but it sure is a lot easier and cheaper (well, at least in terms of the cost of goods sold) than adding some sort of liquid cooling to a system. But we have always …
Starting way back in the late 1980s, when Sun Microsystems was on the rise in the datacenter and Hewlett Packard was its main rival in Unix-based systems, market forces compelled IBM to finally and forcefully field its own open systems machines to combat Sun, HP, and others behind the Unix …
While we are big fans of laissez faire capitalism like that of the United States and sometimes Europe — right up to the point where monopolies naturally form and therefore competition essentially stops, and thus monopolists need to be regulated in some fashion to promote the common good as well …
There is a growing number of vendors big and small going hard to the hoop to make processors for artificial intelligence workloads. AI and machine learning are key enablers of automation and analytics that play an increasingly crucial role in a highly distributed IT environment that spans on-premises datacenters, public …
There was a bit of a kerfuffle this week when it looked like AMD was changing its position a little bit on whether or not it would get back into designing and selling server chips based on the Arm architecture. The funny thing is that the world has changed around …
In the longest of runs, say within the next five to ten years, in the large datacenters of the world, the server chassis as we know it will no longer exist. We aren’t talking about the bent metal here. We are talking about ending the tyranny of the motherboard, which …
Featuring highlights, analysis, and stories from the week directly from us to your inbox with nothing in between.
Subscribe now
If they are doing their jobs right, the high performance computing centers around the world in academic and government institutions are supposed to be on the cutting edge of any new technology that boosts the performance of simulation, modeling, analytics, and artificial intelligence. Not the bleeding edge, where the hyperscalers …
The European Processor Initiative (EPI) has pinned its hopes on RISC-V as the path to European semiconductor independence. The program, which began in 2015 with the goal of building a native exascale supercomputer by 2023, took longer than expected to work out the architectural plan for its RISC-V designs but …
Seismic processing cloud infrastructure provider, DUG, has enough combined compute power to grace the leading ten systems on the Top 500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, with around 30 petaflops for seismic processing, full waveform inversion, petrophysics, and other HPC applications in oil and gas via many of …
The last several years have been challenging for the oil and gas industry on nearly all fronts. Still, to keep both the upstream and downstream businesses on the cutting edge, the segment has had to keep spending mightily on supercomputing resources. There are a number of oil and gas supers …
Supply chains have become so complex and tangled that the traditional way of navigating everything from suppliers, inventory, transportation and analytics has been upended. As with all messes, there is deep commercial opportunity for any company that can handle clean-up in a novel, more streamlined way. In a post-2020 world, …
There is nothing at all wrong with legacy application and system software as long as it can deliver scalability, reliability, and performance. Changing from one software stack to another is so difficult and so risky — the proverbial changing of the front two tires on the car while going down …
In an ideal world, there is a balance between compute, network, and storage that allows for the CPUs to be fed with data such that they do not waste too much of their processing capacity spinning empty clocks. System architects try to get as close as they can to the …
If there is anything for certain in the business of HPC it’s that building and maintaining a profitable enterprise is tough, even for established supercomputer makers like Cray (later acquired by HPE). Penguin Computing has been no exception but managed to weather its own storms, which included tactics like borrowing …
COMMISSIONED Software changes like the weather, and hardware changes like the landscape; each affects the other over geologic timescales to create a new climate. And this — largely — explains why it has taken so long for open-source computing to spread its tentacles into the hardware world. With software, all …
All Content Copyright The Next Platform
