Items tagged with supercomputing
As artificial intelligence expands exponentially, the hardware powering it must expand as well. Therefore, Microsoft’s Azure is announcing their powerful ND A100 v4 virtual machine series. Each device will be kitted out with eight impressive NVIDIA Ampere A100 Tensor Core GPUs. The ND A100 v4 won’t work alone, however, as the Azure blog post states that, “Just like the human brain is composed of interconnected neurons, our ND A100 v4-based clusters can scale up to thousands of GPUs with an unprecedented 1.6 Tb/s of interconnect bandwidth per VM.” When this horsepower is put together and scaled properly, any level of AI work can be accomplished. Azure claims that the bandwidth...
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NVIDIA has announced a new high-performance cloud-native platform at Mobile World Congress called the NVIDIA EGX Edge Supercomputing Platform. The EGX platform is designed to allow organizations to harness streaming data from factory floors, manufacturing inspection lines, and city streets to securely deliver what NVIDIA calls next-gen AI, IoT, and 5G-based services at scale with low latency. The platform combines NVIDIA CUDA-X software with NVIDIA-certified GPU servers and devices. Early adopters of the new platform include Walmart, BMW, Procter & Gamble, Samsung Electronics, and NTT East. Some cities have adopted the platform as well, including San Francisco and Las Vegas. EGX platform...
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Samsung finally has a launch vehicle for its high-performance Z-NAND memory. Z-NAND, which is a supercharged variant of existing 3D NAND technology, is widely viewed as Samsung's credible alternative to Intel's 3D XPoint “Optane” memory technology (see our recent reviews). The company today launched the SZ985 Z-SSD, which is shipping in both 240GB and 800GB capacities. Samsung is specifically targeting the Z-SSD at "advanced enterprise applications including supercomputing for AI analysis". These applications require ultra-fast I/O subsystems, and Samsung promises to deliver in spades. The Z-SSD family is a four-lane NVMe PCIe device that fits into a single slot, while its Z-NAND...
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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...
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The supercomputing conference SC13 kicks off this week, which means we'll be seeing a great deal of information related to multiple initiatives and launches from all the major players in High Performance Computing (HPC). Nvidia is kicking off their own event with the launch of a new GPU and a strategic partnership with IBM. For those of you that follow the consumer market, the GPU is going to look fairly familiar. K40 -- GK110 Goes Full Fat Just as the GTX 780 Ti was the full consumer implementation of the GK110 GPU, the new K40 Tesla card is the supercomputing / HPC variant of the same core architecture. The K40 picks up additional clock headroom and implements the same variable clock speed...
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Intel announced a set of new enterprise products today aimed at furthering its strengths in the TOP500 supercomputing market. As of today, the Chinese Tiahne-2 supercomputer (aka Milky Way 2) is now the fastest supercomputer on the planet at roughly ~54PFLOPs. That's double the speed of the old leader, the AMD/Nvidia powered Titan at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The new system draws significantly more power than the Titan, (17.8MW vs. 8.2MW) but overall power efficiency is fairly similar. The Titan's GFLOP/W ratio is 2.143, while the new Tianhe hits 1.935. Intel is putting its own major push behind heterogeneous computing with the Tianhe-2. Each node contains two Ivy Bridge sockets and three...
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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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When Nvidia launched the consumer-oriented GK104 earlier this year, the company made it clear that the enthusiast-oriented GPU was the first iteration of a two-GPU strategy. K20, we were told, would launch later in the year, with certain features aimed at accelerating supercomputing and HPC workloads. Today, Nvidia is taking the wraps off that second GPU. As expected, it's a monster; the Nvidia K20, based on the GK110 GPU weighs in at 7.1B transistors, double the GK104's 3.54B. GK110 keeps Kepler's basic SMX structure. Each SMX unit contains 192 CUDA cores, 32 load/store units, 16 texture units, and 4 warp schedulers. There are 15 SMX units per die as compared to Kepler's eight. Neither...
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Geez, didn’t supercomputing just break the petaflop barrier a few years ago? Already, the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) and the University of Texas at Austin announced a supercomputer that will be capable of 10 petaflops. Dubbed “Stampede” (we see what you did there, University of Texas Longhorns), the beast will be completed in early 2013. Intel touted this announcement in a blog post today, and the company is understandably pleased with itself, as Stampede’s processing power will be an all-Intel affair. Of those 10 petaflops, two will be delivered by Intel’s 8-core Xeon E5 processors. The other eight will be provided by Intel’s forthcoming Many Integrated...
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We've discussed Sony's decision to shut down Other OS functionality and abandon the supercomputing market several times in the past 12 months. One of the expansions in progress even as Sony killed these programs, dubbed Condor, is now fully online for the first time. This new cluster is composed of 1,716 PS3s and, if it delivers as promised, will greatly enhance the quality of image processing available to the Air Force and Air National Guard. The system has been some years in the building—the Rome NY-based research lab first began requesting additional PS3's back in 2009. Digital image processing has always been one of the PS3's greatest strengths, some of Sony's original demonstrations...
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Last month, an Australian judge granted Sony complete control over an inventory of PS3 jailbreak devices, but winning its court case apparently wasn't enough for the console giant. On Monday, September 6, Sony's Director of Hardware Marketing, John Koller, announced: "A minor update to your PS3 system is now available via system software update v3.42 that includes additional security features." In this case, "additional security features" translates directly into "plugging the latest firmware hole end-users are exploring." Maybe it's time to throw in the towel and admit we don't really get Sony. Oh, it's easy to understand why the company is afraid of jailbroken PS3s—the company has an...
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Earlier this week, we covered news that a California PS3 owner, Anthony Ventura, had filed a class action lawsuit against Sony, alleging that the company's decision to terminate the PS3's Linux support via firmware update constituted a false/deceptive marketing practice. While most PS3 owners never took advantage of the system's Linux capabilities, "Other OS" functionality is critical to the universities and institutions that have deployed PS3 clusters as high-performance compute farms. We talked with several project leads on the impact of Sony's decision, and what it means for low-cost supercomputing programs. Blunderingly, Sony Nukes PS3 Supercomputing...
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Earlier this week, we covered news that a California PS3 owner, Anthony Ventura, had filed a class action lawsuit against Sony, alleging that the company's decision to terminate the PS3's Linux support via firmware update constituted a false/deceptive marketing practice.While most PS3 owners never took advantage of the system's Linux capabilities, "Other OS" functionality is critical to the universities and institutions that have deployed PS3 clusters as high-performance compute farms. We talked with several project leads on the impact of Sony's decision, and what it means for low-cost supercomputing programs. Cluster of PS3s, U.S.A.F. 2,000 Console SupercomputerImage courtesy: U.S. Air ForceIn...
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Synopsys Builds Electronic Design Automation Industry's First Supercomputer to Claim 242nd Spot on Top500 List Synopsys, Inc., a world leader in semiconductor design software, today announced it is the first electronic design automation (EDA) company to be included on a list of sites operating the world's most powerful supercomputers. The Synopsys-built supercomputer was ranked as the 242nd most powerful supercomputer in the world by Top500, an independent organization of international supercomputing experts that tracks the world's most powerful computers. The Synopsys supercomputer was built to quickly perform production runs with intense compute needs. Synopsys constructed the supercomputer...
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Cray XT4 Supercomputer Debuts With Petascale Capability Significant Backlog of Large Orders System Built on Cray XT Infrastructure Represents a Milestone for Cray's Adaptive Supercomputing Vision... SEATTLE, WA -- (MARKET WIRE) -- November 13, 2006 -- Cray Inc. (NASDAQ: CRAY) today announced the availability of its next-generation massively parallel processing (MPP) system, the Cray XT4TM supercomputer. The powerful new supercomputer, previously code-named "Hood," is designed to easily and efficiently scale to a peak performance of more than one petaflops (1,000 trillion floating-point operations per second). The Cray XT4 supercomputer debuts with several large system orders announced...
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