• The System Bottleneck Shifts To PCI-Express

    July 14, 2017

    No matter what, system architects are always going to have to contend with one – and possibly more – bottlenecks when they design the machines that store and crunch the data that makes the world go around. These days, there is plenty of compute at their disposal, a reasonable amount of main memory to hang off of it, and both Ethernet and InfiniBand are on the cusp of 200 Gb/sec of performance and not too far away from 400 Gb/sec and even higher bandwidths.

    Now, it looks like the peripheral bus based on the PCI-Express protocol is becoming the bottleneck, …

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  • Securing The HPC Infrastructure

    July 12, 2017 Dan Robinson

    In the world of high performance computing (HPC), the most popular buzzwords include speed, performance, durability, and scalability. Security is one aspect of HPC that is not often discussed, or else seems to be relatively low on the list of priorities when organizations begin building out their infrastructures to support a demanding new applications, whether for oil and gas exploration, machine learning, simulations, or visualization of complex datasets.

    While IT security is paramount for businesses in the digital age, HPC systems typically do not encounter the same risks as public-facing infrastructures – in the same way as a web server …

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  • China Tunes Neural Networks for Custom Supercomputer Chip

    July 11, 2017

    Supercomputing centers around the world are preparing their next generation architectural approaches for the insertion of AI into scientific workflows. For some, this means retooling around an existing architecture to make capability of double-duty for both HPC and AI.

    Teams in China working on the top performing supercomputer in the world, the Sunway TaihuLight machine with its custom processor, have shown that their optimizations for theSW26010 architecture on deep learning models have yielded a 1.91-9.75X speedup over a GPU accelerated model using the Nvidia Tesla K40m in a test convolutional neural network run with over 100 parameter configurations.

    Efforts on …

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  • InfiniBand And Proprietary Networks Still Rule Real HPC

    June 30, 2017

    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. That’s why we like to take a deep dive into the networking trends present in each iteration of the Top 500 supercomputer rankings as they come out.

    It has been a long time since the Top 500 gave a snapshot of pure HPC centers that …

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  • Momentum is Building for ARM in HPC

    June 30, 2017 Jonathan Beard, Roxana Rusitoru

    2011 marked ARM’s first step into the world of HPC with the European Mont-Blanc project. The premise was simple: leverage the energy efficiency of ARM-based mobile designs for high performance computing applications.

    Unfortunately, making the leap from the mobile market to HPC was not an easy feat. Long time players in this space, such as Intel and IBM, hold home field advantage: that of legacy software. HPC-optimized libraries, compilers and applications were already present for these platforms. This was not, however, the case for ARM. Early adopters had to start, largely from scratch, porting and building an ecosystem with a …

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  • Giving Out Grades For Exascale Efforts

    June 27, 2017

    Just by being the chief architect of the IBM’s BlueGene massively parallel supercomputer, which was built as part of a protein folding simulation grand challenge effort undertaken by IBM in the late 1990s, Al Gara would be someone whom the HPC community would listen to whenever he spoke. But Gara is now an Intel Fellow and also chief exascale architect at Intel, which has emerged as the second dominant supplier of supercomputer architectures alongside Big Blue’s OpenPower partnership with founding members Nvidia, Mellanox Technologies, and Google.

    It may seem ironic that Gara did not stay around IBM to help this …

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  • Exascale on the Far Horizon for Cash-Strapped Oil and Gas

    June 23, 2017

    All the compute power in the world is useless against code that cannot scale. And neither compute or code can be useful if growing data for simulations cannot be collected and managed.

    But ultimately, none of this is useful at all if the industry that needs these HPC resources is having more trouble than ever acquiring them. It comes as no surprise that the national labs and major research centers will be the first to get exaflop-capable systems, but in a normal market (like the one oil and gas knew not long ago) these machines would be relatively quickly followed …

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  • Casing The HPC Market Is Hard, And Getting Harder

    June 22, 2017

    Markets are always changing. Sometimes information technology is replaced by a new thing, and sometimes it morphs from one thing to another so gradually that is just becomes computing or networking or storage as we know it. For instance, in the broadest sense, all infrastructure will be cloudy, even if it is bare metal machines or those using containers or heavier server virtualization. In a similar way, in the future all high performance computing may largely be a kind of artificial intelligence, bearing little resemblance to the crunch-heavy simulations we are used to.

    It has taken two decades for cloud …

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  • The Biggest Shift in Supercomputing Since GPU Acceleration

    June 22, 2017

    For years, the pace of change in large-scale supercomputing neatly tracked with the curve of Moore’s Law. As that swell flattens, and as the competitive pressure ticks up to build productive exascale supercomputers in the next few years, HPC has been scrambling to find the silver bullet architecture to reach sustained exascale performance. And as it turns out, there isn’t one.

    But there is something else—something few saw coming three years ago, has less to do with hardware than it does a shift in how we approach massive-scale simulations, and is happening so fast that too-far-ahead-of-time procurements are …

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  • Thinking Through The Cognitive HPC Nexus With Big Blue

    June 21, 2017

    There are plenty of things that the members of the high performance community do not agree on, there is a growing consensus that machine learning applications will at least in some way be part of the workflow at HPC centers that do traditional simulation and modeling.

    Some HPC vendors think the HPC and AI systems have either already converged or will soon do so, and others think that the performance demands (both in terms of scale and in time to result) on both HPC and AI will necessitate radically different architectures and therefore distinct systems for these two workloads. IBM, …

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