Today is the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the “Venado” supercomputer, which was hinted at back in April 2021 when Nvidia announced its plans for its first datacenter-class Arm server CPU and which was talked about in some detail – but not really enough to suit our taste for speeds and feeds – back in May 2022 by the folks at Los Alamos National Laboratory where Venado is situated. …
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois just fired up its Delta system back in April 2022, and now it has just been given $10 million by the National Science Foundation to expand that machine with an AI partition, called DeltaAI appropriately enough, that is based on Nvidia’s “Hopper” H100 GPU accelerators. …
It was a fortuitous coincidence that Nvidia was already working on massively parallel GPU compute engines for doing calculations in HPC simulations and models when the machine learning tipping point happened, and similarly, it was fortunate for InfiniBand that it had the advantage of high bandwidth, low latency, and remote direct memory access across GPUs at that same moment. …
Here is an old saw that we bring out of the toolbox every now and then, and we use it just enough so it has never really gotten rusty and it can cut through a lot of crap to make a point: The datacenter, and perhaps all clients, would have been better off if InfiniBand had just become the ubiquitous I/O switched fabric standard it was designed to be back in the late 1990s. …
In modern system architecture, there is a lot of shifting pieces of systems software (particularly in the control plane) and often their workloads around between pieces of silicon to get better bang for the buck, to improve the overall security of the system, or both. …
UPDATED* Until exascale supercomputers get a lot cheaper, which will allow weather forecasting models to run at a much smaller resolution – and more frequently – to deliver hyper-local weather forecasts, the actual weather forecasting is still going to be done by people. …
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. …
When it comes to supercomputing in academia, the cost of a cluster is almost always an issue and this, coupled with the desire to drive as much compute as possible, drives architectural choices. …
There are so many barriers to capacity increases in high performance computing systems that it would take a long time to rattle them off. …
Managing an aging nuclear weapons stockpile requires a tremendous – and ever-increasing – amount of supercomputing performance, and the HPC system business the world over is focused on this as much as trying to crack the most difficult scientific, medical, and engineering problems. …
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