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In A Peer-To-Peer Datacenter, PCI-Express Fabrics Will Be Pervasive

Supercomputers are expensive, and getting increasingly so. Even if they are delivering impressive performance gains over the past decade, modern HPC workloads require an incredible amount of performance, and this is particularly true of any workload that is going to blend together traditional HPC simulation and modeling with some sort of machine learning training and inference.

Compute

The AMD “Aldebaran” GPU That Won Exascale

If you want to know how and why AMD motors have been chosen for so many of the pre-exascale and exascale HPC and AI systems, despite the dominance of Intel in CPUs and the dominance of Nvidia in GPUs, you need look no further for an answer than the new “Aldebaran” Instinct MI200 GPU accelerator from AMD and its Infinity Fabric 3.0 coherent interconnect that is being also added to selected Epyc CPUs.

Compute

Where China’s Long Road To Datacenter Compute Independence Leads

While we are big fans of laissez faire capitalism like that of the United States and sometimes Europe — right up to the point where monopolies naturally form and therefore competition essentially stops, and thus monopolists need to be regulated in some fashion to promote the common good as well as their own profits — we also see the benefits that accrue from a command economy like that which China has built over the past four decades.