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. …
Whenever one company buys another, every product line, every research project, and every employee is ultimately in play. …
It may have taken the better part of a decade, but the Itanium platform has yielded the kinds of profits that Hewlett Packard Enterprise long sought and rarely attained. …
Per aspera, ad astra, an old Latin adage that means “through striving, to the stars,” is the root of the name for a hybrid HPC and AI supercomputer that the Grand Équipment National de Calcul Intensif (GENCI), working in conjunction with the Centre Informatique National de l’Enseignement Supérieur (CINES), one of three national HPC centers in France, will be building next year to bring a factor of 20X more compute power to bear on scientific applications. …
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