Speaking in generalities across any aspect of history is always risky, but that is what the job of history is. The first wave of open source software in | Continue reading
If there is one thing that is consistently true about HPC clusters for the past thirty years and for AI training systems for the past decade, it is as | Continue reading
The top hyperscalers and clouds are rich enough to build out infrastructure on a global scale and create just about any kind of platform they feel like. | Continue reading
As you might expect, we believe in the strength, resilience, and utility of platforms and we carefully watch as companies emerge and try to commercialize | Continue reading
Commissioned: Not everybody wants to be Iron Man. But there isn’t an artist or engineer around that doesn’t envy the 3D, immersive design experience that | Continue reading
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co is the world’s largest and most advanced producer of semiconductors, and is therefore a “bellwether” for the | Continue reading
It is perplexing to us that the world’s largest distributor of client and server operating systems and also the creator of the Linux-based, open source | Continue reading
It seems like we have been talking about Google’s TPUv4 machine learning accelerators for a long time, and that is because we have been. And today, at the | Continue reading
Whenever a process shrink is available to chip designers, there are several different levers they can pull to make a more powerful compute engine. With | Continue reading
Predicting the future is hard, even with supercomputers. And maybe specifically when you are talking about predicting the future of supercomputers. As we | Continue reading
The old AMD – the one before Lisa Su took over – was often brilliant with its instruction set architecture and CPU designs, but sometimes perplexingly | Continue reading
After nearly six decades of getting smaller, faster, cooler, and cheaper, transistors are getting more and more expensive with each generation, and one | Continue reading
If the semiconductor business teaches us anything, it is that volumes matter more than architecture. A great design doesn’t mean all that much if the | Continue reading
In emerging computing fields like quantum computing and neuromorphic computing, hardware usually grabs the lion’s share of attention. You can see the | Continue reading
It has been nearly four decades since the Chinese Academy of Sciences handed Liu Chuanzhi and Danny Lui $25,000 to help found Legend, originally a maker | Continue reading
When computer architectures change in the datacenter, the attack always comes from the bottom. And after more than a decade of sustained struggle, Arm Ltd | Continue reading
For decades, we have been using software to chop up servers with virtualization hypervisors to run many small workloads on a relatively big piece of iron. | Continue reading
One of the first tenets of machine learning, which is a very precise kind of data analytics and statistical analysis, is that more data beats a better | Continue reading
We have been talking about silicon photonics so long that we are, probably like many of you, frustrated that it already is not ubiquitous. But the good | Continue reading
For the past four years, Nvidia’s datacenter business, which includes GPUs, networking, and servers, has been hot on the heels of its gaming GPU business. | Continue reading
The majority of AMD’s CPU lineup – essentially any processor using Zen 1, Zen 2, or Zen 3 cores with simultaneous multithreading (SMT) enabled – is | Continue reading
Chip design is as much of an art as it is an engineering feat. With all of the possible layouts of logic and memory blocks and the wires linking them, | Continue reading
System architects are often impatient about the future, especially when they can see something good coming down the pike. And thus, we can expect a | Continue reading
Software is not actually eating the world, but it is absolutely smashing out of appliance-style boxes and creating a massive, interconnected overlay atop | Continue reading
Sometimes, competing for business means coming up with better products than your rivals. And other times, competing means just not screwing up while your | Continue reading
This day always comes. It is the nature of monopoly and hubris. It came for IBM. It came for Microsoft, and it is coming for Facebook. It will come for | Continue reading
Natural language processing has been an easy fit for these relatively early days of artificial intelligence. Teaching computers how humans speak and write | Continue reading
Back in early July, we covered the launch of IBM’s entry and midrange Power10 systems and mused about how Big Blue could use these systems to reinvigorate | Continue reading
If you are an HPC center in Europe, and particularly one that is funded by public funds, you are thinking about Arm-based CPUs in your supercomputers. And | Continue reading
In Nvidia’s decade and a half push to make GPU acceleration core to all kinds of high performance computing, a key component has been the CUDA parallel | Continue reading
The people running Google Cloud can see the tides of HPC changing and know that, as we discussed only a few months ago, there is a fairly good chance that | Continue reading
UPDATED* Perhaps Janet Jackson should be the official spokesperson of the supercomputing industry. The US Department of Energy has a single 2 exaflops | Continue reading
After almost two years with data storage giant Western Digital, Ashley Gorakhpurwalla is getting used to the questions. They tend to boil down to the same | Continue reading
In the past several decades, data processing and storage systems could be architected from best of breed components, and the market could – and did – | Continue reading
The ink is barely dry on the PCI-Express 6.0 specification, which was released after years of development in January 2022, we hardly have PCI-Express 5.0 | Continue reading
In March 2020, when Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced the exascale “El Capitan” supercomputer contract had been awarded to system builder | Continue reading
It is relatively easy to get a group of people that creates a new database management system or new data store. We know this because over the past five | Continue reading
We have been excited about the possibilities of adding tiers of memory to systems, particularly persistent memories that are less expensive than DRAM but | Continue reading
Exascale supercomputing is just as important to Europe as it is to the United States and China, but each of these geopolitical regions on Earth has its | Continue reading
IT organizations, especially the key hyperscalers and cloud builders, don’t buy point products, they buy roadmaps. And they pay for them, too. And the | Continue reading
A European team of university students has cobbled together the first RISC-V supercomputer capable of showing balanced power consumption and performance. | Continue reading
Just ahead of the revelations about the feeds and speeds of the “Frontier” supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory concurrent with the | Continue reading
For the last few years, Graphcore has primarily been focused on slinging its IPU chips for training and inference systems of varying sizes, but that is | Continue reading
Something that we have been waiting for a decade and a half to see has just happened: The datacenter is now the biggest business at Nvidia. Bigger even | Continue reading
The emerging field of neuromorphic processing isn’t an easy one to navigate. There are major players in the field that are leveraging their size and ample | Continue reading
It is hard to imagine, but someday, IBM may not care much about its proprietary System z and Power Systems platforms. Or, more precisely, it may not be | Continue reading
The nexus of traditional high performance computing and artificial intelligence is a fact, not a theory, and the exascale-class machinery installed in the | Continue reading
In a post Moore’s Law world, domain specific hardware is becoming more common. But getting a new compute engine into the field is not just about having | Continue reading