• An Exascale Timeline for Storage and I/O Systems

    August 16, 2017

    The more things change, the more they stay the same.

    While exascale supercomputers mark a next step in performance capability, at the broader architectural level, the innovations that go into such machines will be the result of incremental improvements to the same components that have existed on HPC systems for several years.

    In large-scale supercomputing, many performance trends have jacked up capability and capacity—but the bottlenecks have not changed since the dawn of computing as we know it. Memory latency and memory bandwidth remain the gating factors to how fast, efficiently, and reliably big sites can run—and there is still …

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  • Is HPE’s “Machine” the Novel Architecture to Fit Exascale Bill?

    June 18, 2017

    The exascale effort in the U.S. got a fresh injection with R&D funding set to course through six HPC vendors to develop scalable, reliable, and efficient architectures and components for new systems in the post-2020 timeframe.

    However, this investment, coming rather late in the game for machines that need hit sustained exaflop performance in a 20-30 megawatt envelope in less than five years, raises a few questions about potential shifts in what the Department of Energy (DoE) is looking for in next-generation architectures. From changes in the exascale timeline and new focal points on “novel architectures” to solve exascale challenges, …

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  • American HPC Vendors Get Government Boost for Exascale R&D

    June 15, 2017

    The US Department of Energy – and the hardware vendors it partners with – are set to enliven the exascale effort with nearly a half billion dollars in research, development, and deployment investments.  The push is led by the DoE’s Exascale Computing Project and its extended PathForward program, which was announced today.

    The future of exascale computing in the United States has been subjected to several changes—some public, some still in question (although we received a bit more clarification and we will get to in a moment). The timeline for delivering an exascale capability system has also shifted, with most …

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  • Some Surprises in the 2018 DoE Budget for Supercomputing

    May 23, 2017

    The US Department of Energy fiscal year 2018 budget request is in. While it reflects much of what we might expect in pre-approval format in terms of forthcoming supercomputers in particular, there are some elements that strike us as noteworthy.

    In the just-released 2018 FY budget request from Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR), page eight of the document states that “The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility will operate Mira (at 10 petaflops) and Theta (at 8.5 petaflops) for existing users, while turning focus to site preparations for deployment of an exascale system of novel architecture.”

    Notice anything missing in this description? …

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  • Machine Learning, Analytics Play Growing Role in US Exascale Efforts

    April 4, 2017 Jeffrey Burt

    Exascale computing promises to bring significant changes to both the high-performance computing space and eventually enterprise datacenter infrastructures.

    The systems, which are being developed in multiple countries around the globe, promise 50 times the performance of current 20 petaflop-capable systems that are now among the fastest in the world, and that bring corresponding improvements in such areas as energy efficiency and physical footprint. The systems need to be powerful run the increasingly complex applications being used by engineers and scientists, but they can’t be so expensive to acquire or run that only a handful of organizations can use them.

    At …

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  • Argonne National Lab Lead Details Exascale Balancing Act

    March 30, 2017 Jeffrey Burt

    It’s easy when talking about the ongoing push toward exascale computing to focus on the hardware architecture that will form the foundation of the upcoming supercomputers. Big systems packed with the latest chips and server nodes and storage units still hold a lot of fascination, and the names of those vendors involved – like Intel, IBM and Nvidia – still resonate broadly across the population. And that interest will continue to hold as exascale systems move from being objects of discussion now to deployed machines over the next several years.

    However, the development and planning of these systems is a …

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  • AMD Researchers Eye APUs For Exascale

    February 28, 2017

    Exascale computing, which has been long talked about, is now – if everything remains on track – only a few years away. Billions of dollars are being spent worldwide to develop systems capable of an exaflops of computation, which is 50 times the performance of the most capacious systems the current Top500 supercomputer rankings and will usher in the next generation of HPC workloads.

    As we have talked about at The Next Platform, China is pushing ahead with three projects aimed at delivering exascale systems to the market, with a prototype – dubbed the Tianhe-3 – being prepped for …

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  • Exascale Leaders on Next Horizons in Supercomputing

    February 23, 2017 Matt Gillespie

    One way to characterize the challenges of achieving exascale, is to look at how advancing compute, memory/storage, software, and fabric will lead to a future-generation balanced system. Recently Al Gara of Intel, Jean-Philippe Nominé of the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), and Katherine Riley of Argonne National Lab were on a panel that weighed in on these and a host of other interrelated challenges.

    Exascale will represent a watershed achievement in computer science. More than just a nice, round number (“exa-” denotes a billion billion), exascale computing is also supposed1 by the Human Brain Project and …

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  • Chip Makers and the China Challenge

    February 2, 2017

    China represents a big and growing market opportunity for IT vendors around the world. It’s huge population and market upside compared with the more mature regions across the globe is hugely attractive to system and component makers, and the Chinese government’s willingness to spend money to help build up the country’s compute capabilities only adds to the allure. In addition, it is home to such hyperscale players as Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, which like US counterparts Google, Facebook and eBay are building out massive datacenters that are housing tens of thousands of servers.

    However, those same Chinese government officials aren’t …

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  • IARPA Spurs Race to Speed Cryogenic Computing Reality

    January 31, 2017

    The race is on to carve a path to efficient extreme-scale machines in the next five years but existing processing approaches fall far short of the efficiency and performance targets required. As we reported at the end of 2016, the Department of Energy in the U.S. is keeping its eye on non-standard processing approaches for one of its exascale-class systems by 2021, and other groups, including the IEEE are equally keeping pace with new architectures to explore as CMOS alternatives.

    While there is no silver bullet technology yet that we expect will sweep current computing norms, superconducting circuits appear …

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