Items tagged with Cray
The United States Navy is enlisting a multi-million dollar Cray Shasta supercomputer powered by hundreds of thousands of AMD EPYC server processor cores and over 100 NVIDIA Volta GPUs. It ranks as the largest, most capable supercomputing system every deployed by the Department of Defense (DoD). Cray Shasta houses 290,304 EPYC 7002-series processors core and 112 Volta V100 general purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUS). The hardware is all interconnected by way of a 200 gigabit per second (Gbps) Cray Slingshot network. To round things out, Cray Shasta is outfitted with 590 total terabytes (TB) of memory and 14 petabytes (PB) of usable storage, including 1PB of NVMe-based solid date drive storage....
Read more...
In sticking with the plan that was announced last summer, Indiana University is now the owner of Cray's first "Shasta" supercomputer. As shown in the image above, it bears the university's color scheme and is called Big Red 200, which is a tribute to the 200th anniversary of IU. In addition to oozing school pride, Big Red 200 is notable because it will rock NVIDIA's next-generation Ampere GPUs. NVIDIA has not yet released Ampere, but is expected to soon. We have covered various leaks and rumors on the subject, as it pertains to NVIDIA's efforts in the gaming space, but Ampere will also find a home in datacenters and supercomputer applications. Or at least that is the expectation, based on what...
Read more...
If you just built a high-end desktop (HEDT) configuration based on a Threadripper or Core-X processor, you may want to avert your eyeballs somewhere else. At the very least, brace yourself for some numbers to follow. Your system is still fast, mind you, just not as fast as a pair of EPYC 7H12 processors in a Cray Shasta supercomputer performing a Geekbench run. Before we get to the results, let's talk specs. AMD offers three EPYC processors with 64 physical cores and 128 threads of computing muscle, the EPYC 7H12 is the fastest of the bunch—it has a 2.6GHz base clock and 3.3GHz max boost clock, to go along with 256MB of L3 cache. Here's how it stacks up with a few other EPYC 7002 processors...
Read more...
The hardware may still be in development, but Intel just landed a major design win nonetheless, one that will reportedly culminate in the world’s first Exascale Supercomputer powered partially by Intel’s upcoming Xe graphics technology. It was just announced that Intel and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) will deliver the first supercomputer capable of one exaFLOP of compute performance, or a “quintillion” floating point operations per second. The system, named “Aurora”, is being developed at the DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago. It is being designed for High-Performance Computing and Artificial Intelligence applications and will be used...
Read more...
The Top500 list of supercomputers globally was published again this month, and one of the most interesting tidbits is that every single one of them runs Linux. This list comes out every six months and shows the top supercomputers in the world along with the countries with the most supercomputers. This fiftieth edition shows that there are some changes afoot in global supercomputing power. China has traditionally held the top spot for the most powerful supercomputer in the world, and it continues to hold that spot on the most current list. However, the U.S. has traditionally had the most supercomputers on the list on a per country basis, but that has changed: China now has the most supercomputers...
Read more...
Cray and Microsoft have teamed up to make supercomputing performance readily available for enterprise customers. Cray and Microsoft are offering customers dedicated Cray supercomputing systems in Microsoft Azure datacenters to enable users to run AI, advanced analytics, and modeling and simulation workloads while seamlessly connected to the Azure cloud. Cray wrote, "Cray’s tightly coupled system architecture and Aries interconnect addresses the exponential demand for compute capability, real-time insights, and scalable performance needed by enterprises today. With this new partnership, Cray and Microsoft have made it easier for cloud customers to harness the power of supercomputing and multiply...
Read more...
With the Chinese dominating the charts when it comes to the world’s most powerful supercomputers, the United States is looking to leverage its homegrown talent to usher in next-generation exascale computing. The Department of Energy (DOE) Exascale Computing Project (ECP) is funding six of the country’s top chip firms in order to ensure U.S. leadership in the field. Those companies include AMD, Intel, NVIDIA, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, IBM and Cray. The six companies will have access to $258 million in funds that will be dispersed over a three-year-period. According to DOE, the funds will be used by the six companies to boost research and development in hardware technology, software technology...
Read more...
A team of researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), in collaboration with researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine have taken a step forward in HIV research by running simulations on the Blue Waters Supercomputer, which is comprised of 32 Cray XK7 supercomputer cabinets and is powered by 3,000 NVIDIA Tesla K20X GPU accelerators. The researchers used computer simulations to uncover the chemical structure of the HIV capsid, which according to the press release both protects a virus’ genetic material and also acts as a sort of virus delivery system by sneaking into a human cell and unloading the infection. Blue Waters Supercomputing Center...
Read more...
Desktops may be losing steam as the segment gives way in some part to more mobile machines, but oddly, the largest desktops of all are seeing a huge uptick in attention. Supercomputers far and wide are becoming all the rage at institutions and educational facilities, as the world looks to plow more into science and computational black holes by using giant, always-on computers to handle the dirty work. Today, the Blue Waters supercomputer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign entered production, meaning the behemoth capable of performing quadrillions of calculations every second and working with quadrillions of bytes of data is now crunching numbers around the clock to help scientists...
Read more...
Nvidia has finished work on a new supercomputer at Oak Ridge that showcases the company's K20 Tesla GPUs. The new cluster, dubbed Titan, is expected to break the 20 petaflop barrier. The system is a major upgrade to the Jaguar supercomputer that proceeded it (Jaguar was prominently upgraded last year to AMD's new Bulldozer CPUs after utilizing Magny-Cours products. The net effect of the upgrade has boosted Titan's raw computing power tenfold, while occupying the same floor space as the previous Jaguar system. The supercomputer now contains 18,688 nodes (299,008 CPU cores), with each node built around the AMD Opteron 6274 and Tesla K20. "One challenge in supercomputers today...
Read more...
Cray's future "Cascade" supercomputer will be a veritable powerhouse featuring Intel's Xeon Phi coprocessors built with 22nm 3D tri-gate transistors and Nvidia Tesla GPUs based on the chip designer's next-generation Kepler architecture, the company announced. This is a major win for Nvidia, and the latest in a long series of validations that GPUs have their place in supercomputing platforms. "This is an exciting announcement for us, and for our customers, as it proves that we remain committed to our vision of integrating a range of advanced processing technologies into a single, scalable architecture," said Peg Williams, Cray's senior vice president of high performance computing systems. "Adaptive...
Read more...
SC11 is going on this week in Seattle, and supercomputers are the main topic of conversation. NVIDIA just announced that the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), located at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is deploying a Cray supercomputer accelerated by NVIDIA Tesla GPUs, as part of the Blue Waters project to build one of the world's most powerful computer systems. Tesla GPUs will help enable NCSA to meet the mission of the Blue Waters project, which is to deploy a supercomputer capable of sustained performance of one petaflop on a diverse range of real-world science and engineering applications. Supported by the National Science Foundation and the University...
Read more...
And so, the Jaguar gave way to the Titan. Cray Inc. will upgrade its XT5 “Jaguar” supercomputer at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to its XK6 “Titan” supercomputer, which will be capable of between 10 and 20 petaflops when completed. The contract between Cray and the DOE is worth $97 million and will cover two phases across a few years. The first phase, scheduled for completion yet this year, will see the company replacing XT5 compute blades with XK6, bringing with them AMD Opteron “Interlagos” processors and NVIDIA Tesla 20-series GPUs. Phase two will see further upgrading of the graphics to “Kepler” Tesla...
Read more...
NVIDIA has just announced the addition of CTO Steve Scott to the company’s Tesla Business unit. Steve Scott was the chief architect of the Cray X1 and was involved in the design of the Cray XT, Cray XE and "Cascade" systems as well. According to his bio, Steve Scott holds 27 U.S. patents in the areas of interconnection networks, cache coherence, synchronization mechanisms and scalable parallel architectures and has also served on numerous program committees and as an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. He served 19 years at Cray, the last six as a senior vice president and CTO, responsible for defining Cray's technology and system architecture...
Read more...
