Items tagged with exascale
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...
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The U.S. isn't a slouch in the supercomputer game, but it's just made it clear that it doesn't just want to be powerful in this arena, but be the leader. In a post made on the official Whitehouse homepage, an Executive Order from President Obama is discussed, which involves plans to unveil a supercomputer in the next decade that hits the much-sought-after performance of 1 exaflop. We've been hearing about exascale computing for a while, so it might seem like we're on the verge of it becoming a reality. But when you consider the sheer amount of performance required to hit that target, it's easy to realize why we're still a ways off. The fastest supercomputer in the world right now is the Tianhe-2,...
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Netflix has long chased after methods of improving its movie recommendation algorithms, once even awarding a $1M prize to any team of people who could substantially improve on the then-current design. As part of that process, the company has been researching neural networks. Conventional neural networks are created with vast nodes of CPU clusters, often with several thousand cores in total. Netflix decided to go with something different, and built a neural network based on GPU cores. In theory, GPU cores could be ideal for building neural nets -- they offer huge numbers of cores already linked by fast internal interconnects and with relatively large pools of onboard memory. Whether or not the...
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New details on Intel's upcoming 14nm Xeon Phi (codenamed Knights Landing) suggests that the chip giant is targeting a huge increase in performance, throughput, and total TFLOP count with the next-gen MIC (Many Integrated Core) card. Knights Landing will be the first ground-up redesign of Intel's MIC architecture -- the original Knights Ferry card was a repurposed Larrabee GPU, while the current Knights Corner-based MIC still has texture units integrated on-die left over from its GPU roots. RealWorldTech has published an expose on the upcoming architecture, blending what we know of the new design with some intelligent speculation about its overall structure and capabilities. Knights Landing will...
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Last month, Intel brought us out to the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) in Austin to brief us on its latest and greatest foray into high-performance computing (HPC) and exascale level processing performance. For Intel, years of heady talk about parallelism and exascale computing have finally come to fruition. Intel is bringing to market a pair of Xeon Phi coprocessor offerings in 2013, the 3100 family and the 5110p, and we’ve got the full scoop for you here... Intel’s Exascale HPC Revolution and Xeon Phi...
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Last month, Intel brought us out to the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) in Austin to brief us on their latest and greatest foray into high-performance computing (HPC) and exascale level processing performance. Parallel Computing and the Road to Exascale There are mountains of problems that need to be solved and a myriad of insight to be gained, in fields from the sciences to national security, that require HPC and highly parallel processing to most effectively and efficiently solve. Parallel processing is what the HPC space is all about, and when large amounts of data can be processed and complex problems solved, it can help researchers move from the concept phase to the...
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As powerful as today's super computers are, it's widely believed that we'll see a tectonic shift in supercomputing in this decade - a shift that will leave the world's current super computers far behind. That change is exascale computing technology, which will be thousands of times faster than petaflop super computers. Today, NVIDIA announced that it has a $12.4-million contract to further its exascale computing research. Several U.S. government agencies have an interest in this kind of computing power, for reasons as varied as national defense, medical research, and engine improvement. The Department of Energy has been one of the most visible proponents of making exascale computing a reality...
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It's sort of funny to think about how IBM has changed over the years. Remember when you either had an "IBM-compatible" PC or an Apple? Remember when ThinkPad meant IBM? The company has transformed a lot over the decades, and lately, they've really been on a supercomputer kick. IBM's Watson supercomputer will be on Jeopardy later in the month, representing a huge leap forward in artificial intelligence and speech technology. And now, IBM has landed a deal with the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory to use IBM's next-generation Blue Gene supercomputer to "enable significant advances in areas such as designing ultra-efficient electric car batteries, understanding global...
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