Updated: There is some chatter – some might call it well-informed speculation – going on out there on the Intertubes that Japanese system maker NEC is shutting down its “Aurora” Vector Engine vector processor business. …
When it comes to chips, there is a big difference between a kicker and a fork. …
You know that climate change is a problem when a supercomputer to do short-term prediction of the formation of linear rainbands and the torrential downpours that they cause is 3.4X as powerful as the machines that do the day-to-day weather forecasting in a country. …
Whenever a process shrink is available to chip designers, there are several different levers they can pull to make a more powerful compute engine. …
The old AMD – the one before Lisa Su took over – was often brilliant with its instruction set architecture and CPU designs, but sometimes perplexingly careless with its design choices and chip roadmaps. …
After nearly six decades of getting smaller, faster, cooler, and cheaper, transistors are getting more and more expensive with each generation, and one could argue that this, more than any other factor, is going to drive system architecture choices for the foreseeable future. …
If you are an HPC center in Europe, and particularly one that is funded by public funds, you are thinking about Arm-based CPUs in your supercomputers. …
UPDATED* Perhaps Janet Jackson should be the official spokesperson of the supercomputing industry. …
Hewlett Packard Enterprise has been an early and enthusiastic supporter of alternate processor architectures outside of the standard Xeon X86 CPUs that comprise the vast majority of its revenues and shipments, particularly with Arm server chips starting in 2011. …
UPDATED* Until exascale supercomputers get a lot cheaper, which will allow weather forecasting models to run at a much smaller resolution – and more frequently – to deliver hyper-local weather forecasts, the actual weather forecasting is still going to be done by people. …
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