The question is no longer whether or not the “El Capitan” supercomputer that has been in the process of being installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for the past week – with photographic evidence to prove it – will be the most powerful system in the world. …
The great thing about the Cambrian explosion in compute that has been forced by the end of Dennard scaling of clock frequencies and Moore’s Law lowering in the cost of transistors is not only that we are getting an increasing diversity of highly tuned compute engines and broadening SKU stacks across those engines, but also that we are getting many different interpretations of the CPU, GPU, DPU, and FPGA themes. …
The HPC gurus of the world may have started moving into the hyperscalers and cloud builders in recent years, but they don’t tend to work for vendors and they tend to stay in one place and lean in. …
UPDATED Like many HPC and AI system builders, we are impatient to see what the “Antares” Instinct MI300A hybrid CPU-GPU system on chip from AMD might look like in terms of performance and price. …
If the HPC community didn’t write the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1996, it would have been necessary to invent it. …
We were under the distinct impression that AMD was not going to talk much about its datacenter compute engines at the Consumer Electronics Show, having just launched its “Genoa” Epyc 9004 server CPUs in November with much fanfare. …
In March 2020, when Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced the exascale “El Capitan” supercomputer contract had been awarded to system builder Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which was also kicking in its “Rosetta” Slingshot 11 interconnect and which was tapping future CPU and GPU compute engines from AMD, the HPC center was very clear that it would be using off-the-shelf, commodity parts from AMD, not custom compute engines. …
Decades before there were hyperscalers and cloud builders started creating their own variants of compute, storage, and networking for their massive distributed systems, the major HPC centers of the world fostered innovative technologies that may have otherwise died on the vine and never been propagated in the market at large. …
The Slurm Workload Manager that has its origins at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory as the Simple Linux Utility for Resource Management – and which is used on about two-thirds of the most powerful HPC systems in the world – is looking for new jobs to take on across hybrid cloud infrastructure and machine learning systems running at scale. …
There are a lot of new technologies that are available now or are going to be available shortly that have the potential to radically change the compute, memory, and storage hierarchies in systems. …
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