Over a decade ago we would not have expected accelerators to have be commonplace in the datacenter. While they are not pervasive, a host of new workloads | Continue reading
In the long run of the history of International Business Machines, a conglomerate established back in 1911 whose Electric Tabulating System was custom | Continue reading
Indiana University is the proud owner of the first operational Cray “Shasta” supercomputer on the planet. The $9.6 million system, known as Big Red 200 to | Continue reading
The GPU has become a standard platform for accelerating high performance computing workloads, at least for those that have had their code tweaked to | Continue reading
Like the large enterprises they sell gear to, the big OEMs are a conservative lot and they take a paced, methodical approach to introducing new | Continue reading
Europe is trailing the other major HPC powers in its quest to field exascale supercomputers. The first such European Union machines aren’t scheduled to | Continue reading
The University of Michigan is one of the top academic centers in the United States with over $1.5 billion in research expenditures in 2018. From | Continue reading
The field programmable gate array has always been a different sort of animal in the semiconductor market. While it has evolved from just a bunch of logic | Continue reading
The gap between the performance of processors, broadly defined, and the performance of DRAM main memory, also broadly defined, has been an issue for at | Continue reading
We have been waiting for a long, long time for the ionic bond between compute and main memory to be softened to something a little more covalent and | Continue reading
One of the benefits of the public cloud is that it allows HPC centers to experiment and push the limits of scalability in a way they could never do if | Continue reading
A system is more than its central processor, and perhaps at no time in history has this ever been true than right now. Except, perhaps, in the future | Continue reading
There are at least two – and possibly more – paths to make Arm processors competitive with the Intel and now AMD X86 incumbent processors in the | Continue reading
Intel has made another big move toward its ambition to dominate the artificial intelligence space in the datacenter, acquiring Israeli AI chipmaker Habana | Continue reading
Hyperion Research has declared 2019 as the year that high performance computing in the cloud hit a “tipping point.” Cloud spending for HPC work is | Continue reading
Competition in and of itself does not directly drive innovation – customer needs that might be met by some other product is really what makes suppliers | Continue reading
For those involved with large-scale system planning, design, and procurement for campus-wide supercomputers, the target is balance. Depending on what | Continue reading
Server consumption is a pretty good proxy for how enterprises of all shapes and sizes feel about their particular business. And judging by the number of | Continue reading
If you are going to take on Intel in server processors, you have to play the same kind of long game that Intel itself played as it jumped from the desktop | Continue reading
Amazon Web Services is at the top of an expanding mountain, the dominant player in a public cloud services space that is expected to push past $200 | Continue reading
Not so long ago, there was a question whether exascale supercomputers would be built from a very large number of thin nodes containing only modest amounts | Continue reading
Finally, we get to test out how well or poorly a well-designed Arm server chip will do in the datacenter. And we don’t have to wait for any of the | Continue reading
There are just two Arm-powered supercomputers on the latest TOP500 rankings: the “Astra” system at Sandia National Laboratories and Fujitsu’s new A64FX | Continue reading
One of the recurring themes at the recent HPC Day event that we hosted ahead of the SC19 supercomputing conference in Denver was that capability class | Continue reading
The profit pools in datacenter infrastructure are a bit like oases in the desert: There are a lot of miles between them, and some of them turn out to be | Continue reading
It is funny to think that in a certain light, AMD has Big Blue to thank for its resurgence in the datacenter. And not because IBM is not good at crafting | Continue reading
When it comes to energy-efficient supercomputing, sometimes less is more. That was illustrated this week by Fujitsu with its A64FX prototype, which | Continue reading
As GPU-accelerated servers go, Nvidia’s DGX-2 box is hard to beat. Its 16 V100 GPUs glued together with NVLink provides two petaflops of tensor floating | Continue reading
The days when the X86 processor could do just about every kind of processing in the datacenter are gone. It’s hard to believe it is true, but one need | Continue reading
The one thing that AMD’s return to the CPU market and its more aggressive moves in the GPU compute arena have done, as well as Intel’s plan to create a | Continue reading
The latest list of the world’s top 500 floppiest supercomputers was released this week and the biggest news to report is that there is almost no news to | Continue reading
When you are always looking for what platform architecture will be mainstream, you have to look at what those on the bleeding edge are doing to see what | Continue reading
There are many good processors out there, but there are few that are excellent and elegant inasmuch as they are co-designed for specific workloads and | Continue reading
The Next Platform has been tracking momentum with FPGAs over the last several years with particular emphasis on the role programmable devices will | Continue reading
For much of the decade, a debate around Arm was whether it would fulfill its promise to become a silicon designer with suppliers of any significance to | Continue reading
There is much at stake in the world of datacenter inference and while the market has not yet decided its winners, there are finally some new metrics in | Continue reading
The Forschungszentrum Jülich Supercomputing Center (JSC) in Germany will soon be home to Europe’s first D-Wave quantum computer. By the end of 2020, the | Continue reading
At some point, when the Epyc server CPU and Radeon Instinct GPU accelerator businesses are more substantial, AMD will probably be a lot less opaque about | Continue reading
Supercomputer-maker Cray has launched the ClusterStor E1000, a storage offering designed to serve the entire triumvirate of HPC workloads: simulations, | Continue reading
A few years ago, about two dozen Oracle employees began work in downtown office space in Seattle to start mapping out how to make the enterprise software | Continue reading
Magneto-resistive random access memory (MRAM) is one of those technologies that is often talked about as having the potential to change the computer | Continue reading
It’s par for the course for AI chip startups to focus on peak performance on outdated benchmarks to appeal to the hardware folks who might give their gear | Continue reading
After two and a half quarters of tightening the purse strings, the world’s largest consumers of infrastructure – the eight major hyperscalers and cloud | Continue reading
In the early years of Amazon Web Services, the collection of compute, storage, networking, and platform services (database, analytics, and such) were so | Continue reading
True to its name, Google’s famous Borg cluster controller has absorbed a lot of different ideas about how to manage server clusters and the applications | Continue reading
The image of Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jensen Huang pacing across the stage at a tech conference and talking about his company’s latest new markets for | Continue reading
If the only thing you really know to date about machine learning chip startup, Groq, is that it is led by one of the creators of Google’s TPU and that | Continue reading
The first exaflops-capable supercomputers are just around the corner and to celebrate this milestone-to-be and talk about its ramifications, the US | Continue reading