This week is the eighth annual International Workshop on OpenCL, SYCL, Vulkan, and SPIR-V, and the event is available online for the very first time in its history thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. …
Companies invest in platforms over a decade or more, and that is why architectures persist longer than we might think given technological differences and economic forces. …
Yesterday with the announcement of the forthcoming El Capitan supercomputer, which is set to be more powerful than the top 200 supercomputers combined, we got to thinking about a critical issue that is far less attention-capturing than big performance numbers. …
When talking about high-end HPC systems in the world, much of the attention often is paid to the massive supercomputers that are being developed by the likes of system makers Cray (now part of Hewlett Packard Enterprise and the main contractor on two exascale systems), Fujitsu, Atos, IBM, and others along with component makers Intel (which is a primary contractor on one exascale system), AMD, and Nvidia. …
The European Commission has anted up €3.9 million to create a set of tools and runtime frameworks that will be used to support the exascale supercomputers to be deployed across the continent in the coming decade. …
After a long wait, now we know. All three of the initial exascale-class supercomputer systems being funded by the US Department of Energy through its CORAL-2 procurement are going to be built by Cray, with that venerable maker of supercomputers being the prime contractor on two of them. …
The good news about having a diverse product line, as chip maker AMD increasingly does, is that the company operates like a multi-cylinder engine and that not all of the lines need to be firing full bore for the business to accelerate down its roadmap. …
Creating the Tesla GPU compute platform has taken Nvidia the better part of a decade and a half, and it has culminated in a software stack comprised of various HPC and AI frameworks, the CUDA parallel programming environment, compilers from Nvidia’s PGI division and their OpenACC extensions as well as open source GCC compilers, and various other tools that together account for tens of millions of lines of code and tens of thousands of individual APIs. …
We have to admit that it is often a lot more fun watching an upstart carve out whole new slices of business, or create them out of what appears to be thin air, in the datacenter than it is to watch how it will respond to intense competitive pressures and somehow manage to keep growing despite that. …
The competition for the compute engines in hybrid HPC and AI supercomputer systems is heating up, and it is beginning to look a bit like back to the future with Cray on the rise and AMD also revitalized. …
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