By definition, the national HPC labs are on the very bleeding edge of supercomputing technology, which is necessary given the scope and scale of the problems they are trying to solve through simulation and analysis and enabled by the largesse of their budgets. …
You have no doubt heard the one about making it up in volume, a jokey phrase that people use when a business has to crank out more and more widgets to stay in the same place. …
There is a misconception out there that the hyperscalers of the world are so rich that they always have the shiniest new toys in their datacenters. …
Hewlett Packard Enterprise is hosting its first big shindig, the Discover Europe customer and partner conference, as a company separated from PCs and printers, and is trotting out a new line of systems, code named “Thunderbird” and sold under the brand HPE Synergy, that are follow-ons to its BladeSystem blade servers. …
Without any new plain vanilla processors from Intel, IBM, Fujitsu, AMD, or the relative handful of ARM server chip makers, and with Nvidia launching its Tesla M4 and M40 accelerators aimed at hyperscalers and those looking for cheap single-precision flops ahead of SC15, the “Knights Landing” Xeon Phi chip was pretty much the star of the high performance conference as far as compute is concerned. …
It has been almost six years since the founders of Big Switch Networks started sitting in the research group meetings at Stanford University, which served as the birthplace for software-defined networking, and times have certainly changed. …
The choice of programming tools and programming models is a deeply personal thing to a lot of the techies in the high performance computing space, much as it can be in other areas of the IT sector. …
Every supercomputing center in the world is wrestling with the issues of power, cooling, and compute density, but some have tighter constraints than others and need to have more energy efficient machines than they can get with standard clusters of rack servers. …
Having the best compute engine – meaning the highest performance at a sustainable price/performance – is not enough to guarantee that it will be adopted in HPC, hyperscale, or enterprise settings. …
It is hard to say exactly how much infrastructure revenue went up for grabs when IBM sold off its System x division to Lenovo last year, but in the HPC market, if you look at the data from IDC and Intersect360, which do detailed tracking of HPC organizations in terms of revenues and installed base, the numbers are not small. …
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