Just as the fervor died down around the massive deals for forthcoming pre-exascale supercomputers in the United States following the CORAL procurements (most recently, with the announcement of Aurora—the only one of three such HPC deals that is not betting the future on IBM OpenPower systems) the supercomputing spark was stoked again, this time, from across the pond. …
The rollout of Power8 systems that IBM started last year is nearly completed as the company has put its largest Power E880 configurations into the field, giving an upgrade path to customers who had been using Power7 and Power7+ systems to run large databases and online transaction processing workloads and to others who are looking for more scalable machines to run in-memory databases and their applications like SAP’s HANA stack. …
When one looks at major milestones in supercomputer history, one of the relatively recently markers rests with IBM, which began work its work to create a massively parallel system for protein folding research. …
Update: 5:08 p.m. Eastern – We have been able to dig into more details about the system architecture and confirm Knights Hill architecture and other interconnect/system details. …
Elon Musk is shaking up both the car and space industries with his respective Tesla and SpaceX companies, and the irony is that while the former is totally upending the combustion engine for land transportation with zippy and stylish electric cars, the latter company has to not only embrace but to create new combustion technologies to get a manned mission to Mars as Musk not only dreams of doing, but is making happen. …
It has been about a year since the OpenPower Foundation was formed to provide a development locus for systems based on the Power8 processor and its varied I/O technologies. …
Evaluating the true performance of HPC systems has never been quite as simple as tracking incremental improvements across processor generations, but is increasingly focused on how these tweaks affect the entire stack–and whether such gains are even useful from a memory or I/O perspective. …
Times are booming for the high performance computing oriented Tesla division within Nvidia, according to the company’s CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang who pointed to 10X growth in their supercomputing line since 2008 during his keynote this morning at the annual GPU Technology Conference. …
When the OpenPower Foundation was formed a year and a half ago, IBM had a number of reasons, driven by enlightened self-interest, for fostering a partnerships with Google, Nvidia, Mellanox Technologies, and Tyan. …
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