• Exascale on the Far Horizon for Cash-Strapped Oil and Gas

    June 23, 2017

    All the compute power in the world is useless against code that cannot scale. And neither compute or code can be useful if growing data for simulations cannot be collected and managed.

    But ultimately, none of this is useful at all if the industry that needs these HPC resources is having more trouble than ever acquiring them. It comes as no surprise that the national labs and major research centers will be the first to get exaflop-capable systems, but in a normal market (like the one oil and gas knew not long ago) these machines would be relatively quickly followed …

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  • Casing The HPC Market Is Hard, And Getting Harder

    June 22, 2017

    Markets are always changing. Sometimes information technology is replaced by a new thing, and sometimes it morphs from one thing to another so gradually that is just becomes computing or networking or storage as we know it. For instance, in the broadest sense, all infrastructure will be cloudy, even if it is bare metal machines or those using containers or heavier server virtualization. In a similar way, in the future all high performance computing may largely be a kind of artificial intelligence, bearing little resemblance to the crunch-heavy simulations we are used to.

    It has taken two decades for cloud …

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  • The Biggest Shift in Supercomputing Since GPU Acceleration

    June 22, 2017

    For years, the pace of change in large-scale supercomputing neatly tracked with the curve of Moore’s Law. As that swell flattens, and as the competitive pressure ticks up to build productive exascale supercomputers in the next few years, HPC has been scrambling to find the silver bullet architecture to reach sustained exascale performance. And as it turns out, there isn’t one.

    But there is something else—something few saw coming three years ago, has less to do with hardware than it does a shift in how we approach massive-scale simulations, and is happening so fast that too-far-ahead-of-time procurements are …

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  • Thinking Through The Cognitive HPC Nexus With Big Blue

    June 21, 2017

    There are plenty of things that the members of the high performance community do not agree on, there is a growing consensus that machine learning applications will at least in some way be part of the workflow at HPC centers that do traditional simulation and modeling.

    Some HPC vendors think the HPC and AI systems have either already converged or will soon do so, and others think that the performance demands (both in terms of scale and in time to result) on both HPC and AI will necessitate radically different architectures and therefore distinct systems for these two workloads. IBM, …

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  • Competition Returns To X86 Servers In Epyc Fashion

    June 20, 2017

    AMD has been absent from the X86 server market for so long that many of us have gotten into the habit of only speaking about the Xeon server space and how it relates to the relatively modest (in terms of market share, not in terms of architecture and capability) competition that Intel has faced in the past eight years.

    Those days are over now that AMD has successfully got its first X86 server chip out the door with the launch of the “Naples” chip, the first in a line of processors that will carry the Epyc brand and, if all …

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  • Knights Landing Can Stand Alone—But Often Won’t

    June 19, 2017

    It is a time of interesting architectural shifts in the world of supercomputing but one would be hard-pressed to prove that using the mid-year list of the top 500 HPC systems in the world. We are still very much in an X86 dominated world with the relatively stable number of accelerated systems to spice the numbers, but there are big changes afoot—as we described in depth when the rankings were released this morning.

    This year, the list began to lose one of its designees in the list of “accelerator/offload” architectures as the Xeon Phi moves from offload model to host …

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  • HPC Poised For Big Changes, Top To Bottom

    June 19, 2017

    There is a lot of change coming down the pike in the high performance computing arena, but it has not happened as yet and that is reflected in the current Top 500 rankings of supercomputers in the world. But the June 2017 list gives us a glimpse into the future, which we think will be as diverse and contentious from an architectural standpoint as in the past.

    No one architecture is winning and taking all, and many different architectures are getting a piece of the budget action. This means HPC is a healthy and vibrant ecosystem and not, like enterprise …

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  • Is HPE’s “Machine” the Novel Architecture to Fit Exascale Bill?

    June 18, 2017

    The exascale effort in the U.S. got a fresh injection with R&D funding set to course through six HPC vendors to develop scalable, reliable, and efficient architectures and components for new systems in the post-2020 timeframe.

    However, this investment, coming rather late in the game for machines that need hit sustained exaflop performance in a 20-30 megawatt envelope in less than five years, raises a few questions about potential shifts in what the Department of Energy (DoE) is looking for in next-generation architectures. From changes in the exascale timeline and new focal points on “novel architectures” to solve exascale challenges, …

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  • Tackling Computational Fluid Dynamics in the Cloud

    June 16, 2017 Robin Birtstone

    Cloud computing isn’t just for running office productivity software or realising your startup idea. It can support high-performance computing (HPC) applications that crunch through large amounts of data to produce actionable results.

    Using elastic cloud resources to process data in this way can have a real business impact. What might one of these applications look like, and how could the cloud support it?

    Let’s take buildings as an example. London’s ‘Walkie Talkie’ skyscraper has suffered from a bad rap of late. First it gave the term ‘hot wheels’ a whole new meaning, melting cars by inadvertently focusing the sun’s rays …

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  • The Memory Scalability At The Heart Of The Machine

    June 15, 2017

    Much has been made of the ability of The Machine, the system with the novel silicon photonics interconnect and massively scalable shared memory pool being developed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, to already address more main memory at once across many compute elements than many big iron NUMA servers. With the latest prototype, which was unveiled last month, the company was able to address a whopping 160 TB of DDR4 memory.

    This is a considerable feat, but HPE has the ability to significantly expand the memory addressability of the platform, using both standard DRAM memory and as lower cost memories such …

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