Compute Archives - Page 2 of 73

Dell EMC and Fujitsu Roll Intel FPGAs Into Servers

April 11, 2018 Jeffrey Burt

Nvidia caused a shift in high-end computing more than a decade ago when it introduced its general-purpose GPUs and CUDA development platform to work with CPUs to increase the performance of compute-intensive workloads in HPC and other environments and drive greater energy efficiencies in datacenters.

Nvidia and to a lesser extent AMD, with its Radeon GPUs, took advantage of the growing demand for more speed and less power consumption to build out their portfolios of GPU accelerators and expand their use in a range of systems, to the point where in the last Top500 list of the world’s fastest …
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Talking Up the Expanding Markets for GPU Compute

April 10, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

There is a direct correlation between the length of time that Nvidia co-founder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang speaks during the opening keynote of each GPU Technology Conference and the total addressable market of accelerated computing based on GPUs.

This stands to reason since the market for GPU compute is expanding. We won’t discuss which is the cause and which is the effect. Or maybe we will.

It all started with offloading the parallel chunks of HPC applications from CPUs to GPUs in the early 2000s in academia, which were then first used in production HPC centers a decade …
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Bidders Off And Running After $1.8 Billion DOE Exascale Super Deals

April 9, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Supercomputer makers have been on their exascale marks, and they have been getting ready, and now the US Department of Energy has just said “Go!”

The requests for proposal have been opened up for two more exascale systems, with a budget ranging from $800 million to $1.2 billion for a pair of machines to be installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and a possible sweetener of anywhere from $400 million to $600 million that, provided funding can be found, allows Argonne National Laboratory to also buy yet another exascale machine.

Oak Ridge, Argonne, and Livermore …
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Open Compute Iron Is All About Acceleration

April 6, 2018 Paul Teich

The Open Compute Project (OCP) held its 9th annual US Summit recently, with 3,441 registered attendees this year. While that might seem small for a top-tier high tech event, there were also 80 exhibitors representing most of the cloud datacenter supply chain, plus a host of outstanding technical sessions. We are always on the hunt for new iron, and not surprisingly the most important gear we saw at OCP this year was related to compute acceleration.

Here is how that new iron we saw breaks down across the major trends in acceleration.

The first interesting thing we saw was a …
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AWS Puts More Muscle Behind Machine Learning And Database

April 4, 2018 Jeffrey Burt

Amazon Web Services essentially sparked the public cloud race a dozen years ago when it first launched the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service and then in short order the Simple Storage Service (S3), giving enterprises access to the large amount compute and storage resources that its giant retail business leaned on.

Since that time, AWS has grown rapidly in the number of services it offers, the number of customers it serves, the amount of money it brings in and the number of competitors – including Microsoft, IBM, Google, Alibaba, and Oracle – looking to chip away …
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Inside Nvidia’s NVSwitch GPU Interconnect

April 4, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

At the GPU Technology Conference last week, we told you all about the new NVSwitch memory fabric interconnect that Nvidia has created to link multiple “Volta” GPUs together and that is at the heart of the DGX-2 system that the company has created to demonstrate its capabilities and to use on its internal Saturn V supercomputer at some point in the future.

Since the initial announcements, more details have been revealed by Nvidia about NVSwitch, including details of the chip itself and how it helps applications wring a lot more performance from the GPU accelerators.

Our first observation upon looking …
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Another Step Toward FPGAs in Supercomputing

April 4, 2018 Nicole Hemsoth

There has been plenty of talk about where FPGA acceleration might fit into high performance computing but there are only a few testbeds and purpose-built clusters pushing this vision forward for scientific applications.

While we do not necessarily expect supercomputing centers to turn their backs on GPUs as the accelerator of choice in favor of FPGAs anytime in the foreseeable future. there is some smart investment happening in Europe and to a lesser extent, in the U.S. that takes advantage of recent hardware additions and high-level tool development that put field programmable devices within closer reach–even for centers whose users …
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The Buck Stops – And Starts – Here For GPU Compute

April 3, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Ian Buck doesn’t just run the Tesla accelerated computing business at Nvidia, which is one of the company’s fastest-growing and most profitable products in its twenty five year history. The work that Buck and other researchers started at Stanford University in 2000 and then continued at Nvidia helped to transform a graphics card shader into a parallel compute engine that is helping to solve some of the world’s toughest simulation and machine learning problems.

The annual GPU Technology Conference was held by Nvidia last week, and we sat down and had a chat with Buck about a bunch of things …
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Fueling AI With A New Breed of Accelerated Computing

April 3, 2018 Bill Mannel

A major transformation is happening now as technological advancements and escalating volumes of diverse data drive change across all industries. Cutting-edge innovations are fueling digital transformation on a global scale, and organizations are leveraging faster, more powerful machines to operate more intelligently and effectively than ever.

Recently, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has announced the new HPE Apollo 6500 Gen10 server, a groundbreaking platform designed to tackle the most compute-intensive high performance computing (HPC) and deep learning workloads. Deep learning – an exciting development in artificial intelligence (AI) – enables machines to solve highly complex problems quickly by autonomously analyzing …
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Nvidia’s DGX-2 System Packs An AI Performance Punch

March 28, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

When Nvidia co-founder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang told the assembled multitudes at the keynote opening to the GPU Technology Conference that the new DGX-2 system, weighing in at 2 petaflops at half precision using the latest Tesla GPU accelerators, would cost $1.5 million when it became available in the third quarter, the audience paused for a few seconds, doing the human-speed math to try to reckon how that stacked up to the DGX-1 servers sporting eight Teslas.

This sounded like a pretty high price, even for such an impressive system – really a GPU cluster with some CPU …
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