The twice-annual ranking of distributed computing systems based on the Linpack parallel Fortran benchmark, a widely used and sometimes maligned test, is as much a history lesson as it is an expectation always looking forward, with anticipation, to the next performance milestones in high performance computing. …
Updated: AMD’s “Rome” processors, the second generation of Epyc processors that the company will be putting into the field, are a key step for the company on its path back to the datacenter. …
AMD president and chief executive officer Lisa Su is fond of saying that the road to Rome goes through Naples as a way of reminding everyone that they can’t sit on the sidelines and wait for the second generation “Rome” Epyc processors to come to market in 2019. …
AMD is hosting its “Next Horizon” datacenter event in San Francisco this week, and archrival Intel, which is losing some market share to AMD but not feeling the pain on its books yet thanks to a massive buildout in server infrastructure at hyperscalers, cloud builders, and smaller service providers like telcos, is hitting back by divulging some of its plans for next year’s “Cascade Lake” Xeon lineup. …
If you want to understand where we are going with computer architectures and the compilers that drive them, it is instructive to look at how compilers have made the leap from architecture to architecture starting six decades ago. …
Having multiple related but distinct product lines turns a company into an economic engine that runs a lot smoother than an it would run with a single cylinder. …
People have been talking about software defined networking and its related network function virtualization for so long that it must appear to many organizations that everyone else is doing it. …
While processors and now GPUs tend to get all of the glory when it comes to high performance computing, for the past three decades as distributed computing architectures became the norm in supercomputing, it has been the interconnects that made all the difference in how well – or poorly – these systems perform. …
For the past five years, supercomputer maker Cray has been diligently at work not only creating a new system architecture that allows for a mix of different interconnects and compute for its future “Shasta” systems, but has also brought long-time Cray chief technology officer, Steve Scott, back into the company after two stints spent at Nvidia and Google to create a new interconnect, called “Slingshot,” that is the beating heart of the Shasta system and that signals a return of the Cray that we know and love. …
In one fell swoop that is going to cost Big Blue a whopping $34 billion, IBM is going to become a modern software powerhouse in the datacenter that has to be contended with in an entirely different way. …
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