Without any new plain vanilla processors from Intel, IBM, Fujitsu, AMD, or the relative handful of ARM server chip makers, and with Nvidia launching its Tesla M4 and M40 accelerators aimed at hyperscalers and those looking for cheap single-precision flops ahead of SC15, the “Knights Landing” Xeon Phi chip was pretty much the star of the high performance conference as far as compute is concerned. …
The choice of programming tools and programming models is a deeply personal thing to a lot of the techies in the high performance computing space, much as it can be in other areas of the IT sector. …
Every supercomputing center in the world is wrestling with the issues of power, cooling, and compute density, but some have tighter constraints than others and need to have more energy efficient machines than they can get with standard clusters of rack servers. …
Moore’s Law might be winding down in observable ways, but that realization will not keep Intel from putting its maintenance on the front burner. …
Whether it is IBM with the data-centric approach to next generation supercomputers or Intel with its scalable systems framework, there is little doubt that these and other major players in HPC are thinking differently about how to architect and benchmark systems in a way that balances floating point performance with the other equally important leg of the stool—data movement. …
Having the best compute engine – meaning the highest performance at a sustainable price/performance – is not enough to guarantee that it will be adopted in HPC, hyperscale, or enterprise settings. …
It is hard to say exactly how much infrastructure revenue went up for grabs when IBM sold off its System x division to Lenovo last year, but in the HPC market, if you look at the data from IDC and Intersect360, which do detailed tracking of HPC organizations in terms of revenues and installed base, the numbers are not small. …
For ARM processors to take off in the HPC arena, a whole bunch of pieces have to come together to create a platform that can compete against more established architectures. …
The old adage in the modern datacenter is that compute is free, but data movement is very, very expensive. …
Proprietary and quasi-proprietary interconnects are nothing new to the supercomputing space, and in fact, this is where they still live and thrive and evolve. …
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