The ultimate success of any platform depends on the seamless integration of diverse components into a synergistic whole – well, as much as is possible in the real world – while at the same time being flexible enough to allow for components to be swapped out and replaced by others to suit personal preferences. …
At this point in the 21st Century, a surprisingly large portion of the manufacturing, warehousing, distribution, marketing, and retailing of every good and service known to humankind is dependent on a piece of circuit board with two Xeon processors welded to it, wrapped in some bent sheet metal with a few blinky lights peeking out of the darkness. …
The future “Summit” pre-exascale supercomputer that is being built out in late 2017 and early 2018 for the US Department of Energy for its Oak Ridge National Laboratory looks like a giant cluster of systems that might be used for training neural networks. …
It is hard to tell which part of the HPC market is more competitive: compute, networking, or storage. …
Every new hardware device that offers some kind of benefit compared to legacy devices faces the task of overcoming the immense inertia that is imparted to a platform by the software that runs upon it. …
With most of the year finished and a new one coming up fast, and a slew of new compute and networking technologies ramping for the past year and more on the horizon for a very exciting 2017, now is the natural time to take stock of what has happened in the HPC business and what is expected to happen in the coming years. …
With the “Skylake” Xeon E5 v5 processors not slated until the middle of next year and the “Knights Landing” Xeon Phi processors and Omni-Path interconnect still ramping after entering the HPC space a year ago, there are no blockbuster announcements coming out of Intel this year at the SC16 supercomputing conference in Salt Lake City. …
Not all of the new and interesting high performance computing systems are always in the upper echelons of the Top 500 supercomputing list, which was announced at the opening of the SC16 supercomputing conference in Salt Lake City this week. …
While the machine learning applications created by hyperscalers and the simulations and models run by HPC centers are very different animals, the kinds of hardware that help accelerate the performance for one is also helping to boost the other in many cases. …
Chip maker Nvidia was founded by people who loved gaming and who wanted to make better 3D graphics cards, and decades later, the company has become a force in computing, first in HPC and then in machine learning and now database acceleration. …
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