One of the reasons this year’s Supercomputing Conference (SC) is nearing attendance records has far less to do with traditional scientific HPC and much more to do with growing interest in deep learning and machine learning. …
It must be tough for the hyperscalers that are expanding into public cloud and the public cloud builders that also use their datacenters to run their own businesses to decide whether to hoard all of the new technologies that they can get their hands on for their own benefit, or to make money selling that capacity to others. …
After a long, long wait and years of anticipation, it looks like IBM is finally getting ready to ship commercial versions of its Power9 chips, and as expected, its first salvo of processors aimed at the datacenter will be aimed at HPC, data analytics, and machine learning workloads. …
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. …
Makers of tightly coupled, shared memory machines can make all of the arguments they want about how it is much more efficient and easier to program these NUMA machines than it is to do distributed computing across a cluster of more loosely coupled boxes, but for the most part, the IT market doesn’t care. …
In a properly working capitalist economy, innovative companies make big bets, help create new markets, vanquish competition or at least hold it at bay, and profit from all of the hard work, cleverness, luck, and deal making that comes with supplying a good or service to demanding customers. …
With the network comprising as much as a quarter of the cost of a high performance computing system and being absolutely central to the performance of applications running on parallel systems, it is fair to say that the choice of network is at least as important as the choice of compute engine and storage hierarchy. …
While AMD voluntarily exited the server processor arena in the wake of Intel’s onslaught with the “Nehalem” Xeon processors during the Great Recession, it never stopped innovating with its graphics processors and it kept enough of a hand in smaller processors used in consumer and selected embedded devices to start making money again in PCs and to take the game console business away from IBM’s Power chip division. …
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. …
We are still chewing through all of the announcements and talk at the GPU Technology Conference that Nvidia hosted in its San Jose stomping grounds last week, and as such we are thinking about the much bigger role that graphics processors are playing in datacenter compute – a realm that has seen five decades of dominance by central processors of one form or another. …
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