Compute

The Widening Gyre Of Supercomputing

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.

Compute

Trading Off Security And Performance Thanks To Spectre And Meltdown

The revelations by Google’s Project Zero team earlier this year of the Spectre and Meltdown speculative execution vulnerabilities in most of processors that have powered servers and PCs for the past couple of decades shook the industry as Intel and other chip makers scrambled to mitigate the risk of the threats in the short term and then implement plans to incorporate the mitigation techniques into future versions of the silicon.