• Intel Gears Up For FPGA Push

  October 2, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  

  Chip giant Intel has been talking about CPU-FPGA compute complexes for so long that it is hard to remember sometimes that its hybrid Xeon-Arria compute unit, which puts a Xeon server chip and a midrange FPGA into a single Xeon processor socket, is not shipping as a volume product. But Intel is working to get it into the field and has given The Next Platform an update on the current plan.

  The hybrid CPU-FPGA devices, which are akin to AMD’s Accelerated Computing Units, or APUs, in that they put compute and, in this case, GPU acceleration into a single …

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• IBM Brings Analytics To The Data For Faster Processing

  September 29, 2017 Jeffrey Burt

  

  Data analytics is a rapidly evolving field, and IBM and other vendors over the past several years have built numerous tools to address segments of it. But now Big Blue is shifting its focus to give data scientists and developers the technologies they need more easily and quickly analyze the data and derive insights that they can apply to their businesses strategies.

  “We have [created] a ton of different products that solve parts of the problem,” Rob Thomas, general manager of IBM Analytics, tells The Next Platform. “We’re moving toward a strategy of developing platforms for analytics. This trend …

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• How Oakforest-PACS Outpaced The K Supercomputer

  September 28, 2017 Ken Strandberg

  

  In high performance computing in the public sector, dollars follow teraflops and now petaflops. Especially in the datacenters of academia, where cutting-edge computational research projects funded by large grants seek the most powerful supercomputers in the region.

  Institutions with limited budgets these days are creatively solving their financial supercomputing needs by creating a collective that pools funds and shares computing resources. Some institutions, such as Iowa State University, are doing this internally, with various departments pitching in to buy a single, large HPC cluster, as with their Condo supercomputer.

  In Japan, the University of Tokyo (U Tokyo) and University of …

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• Harnessing Data Insights To Achieve Optimal Energy Consumption

  September 28, 2017 Bill Mannel

  

  In an age of ongoing digital advancement, leaders across all industries are seeking new ways to improve workplace productivity, ensure competitive advantage, and facilitate continued growth. Success hinges on their ability to accelerate time to value, and work more efficiently and effectively than the competition. Innovation and sustainability are key.

  This is particularly true for the energy, oil, and gas (EOG) sector. As the global economy progressively moves away from fossil fuels in search of renewable resources, EOG companies are challenged to operate faster and smarter than ever before. Many organizations are utilizing high performance computing (HPC) technologies in order …

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• Volta GPU Accelerators Hit The Streets

  September 27, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  

  Announcements of new iron are exciting, but it doesn’t get real until customers beyond the handful of elite early adopters can get their hands on the gear.

  Nvidia launched its “Volta” Tesla V100 GPU accelerators back in May, meeting and in some important ways exceeding most of its performance goals, and has been shipping devices, both in PCI-Express and SXM2 form factors, for a few months. Now, the ramp of this complex processor and its packaging of stacked High Bandwidth Memory – HMB2 from Samsung, to be specific – is progressing and the server OEMs and ODMs of the …

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• Plans for First Exascale Supercomputer in U.S. Released

  September 27, 2017 Nicole Hemsoth

  

  This morning a presentation filtered from the Department of Energy’s Office of Science showing the roadmap to exascale with a 2021 machine at Argonne National Lab.

  This is the Aurora machine, which had an uncertain future this year when its budgetary and other details were thrown into question. We understood the deal was being restructured and indeed it has been. The system was originally slated to appear in 2018 with 180 petaflops of peak performance at double precision floating point. Now it is 1,000 petaflops, an exascale capable machine, and will be delivered in 2021—right on target with the …

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• With Machine Learning, Can HPC Be Self Healing?

  September 26, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  

  High performance computing, long the domain of research centers and academia, is increasingly becoming a part of mainstream IT infrastructure and being opened up to a broader range of enterprise workloads, and in recent years, that includes big data analytics and machine learning. At the forefront of this expanded use is MasterCard, a financial services giant that is looking to drive the real-time business benefits of HPC.

  As MasterCard has learned, however, alongside business value come additional needs around data protection. As HPC systems are more likely to hold customer-facing and other compliance related data, such infrastructure has the potential …

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• The Serverless Revolution Will Make Us All Developers

  September 25, 2017 Doug Vanderweide

  

  At Build 2017, Microsoft’s annual and influential developer event, CEO Satya Nadella introduced the idea of the “intelligent cloud” and “intelligent edge.” This vision of software’s immediate future considers the plethora of smart devices – cell phones, appliances, home environment controls, business machinery and the like – that permeate and, in large part, orchestrate our daily lives.

  We all know about the Internet of Things. Today, the ability to glean valuable business insights from seemingly mundane device telemetry is impressive. Consider the case of the connected cows. Researchers at a farm attached pedometers to dairy cows, largely to monitor …

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• Azure Stack Finally Takes Microsoft Public Cloud Private

  September 22, 2017 Paul Teich

  

  Microsoft announced Azure Stack at its Ignite event in September 2016 and soft-launched Azure Stack at its Inspire event in July, when it announced that the private cloud solution was available for customer orders. The first wave of Microsoft’s Azure Stack system partners – Dell EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Lenovo – plan to ship their certified solutions to customers in September. We will be surprised if Microsoft does not announce first customer shipments with those vendors at Microsoft’s Ignite event in late September.

  Azure Stack with compete with other hybrid private cloud frameworks, such as OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, HPE’s …

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• China Arms Upgraded Tianhe-2A Hybrid Supercomputer

  September 20, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  

  As an economic powerhouse and with a rising military and political presence around the world, you would expect, given the inherent political nature of supercomputing, that China would have multiple and massive supercomputing centers as well as a desire to spread its risk and demonstrate its technical breadth by investing in many different kinds of capability class supercomputers.

  And this is precisely what China is doing, including creating its own offload accelerator, based on digital signal processors. This Matrix2000 DSP accelerator, which was unveiled at the ISC16 supercomputing event last year and which is being created by the National University …

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