When it comes to supercomputing in academia, the cost of a cluster is almost always an issue and this, coupled with the desire to drive as much compute as | Continue reading
Frustrated by the limitations of Ethernet, Google has taken the best ideas from InfiniBand and Cray’s “Aries” interconnect and created a new distributed | Continue reading
Frustrated by the limitations of Ethernet, Google has taken the best ideas from InfiniBand and Cray’s “Aries” interconnect and created a new distributed | Continue reading
There is a likelihood that we could see both British chip designer Arm Holdings and one of its server-focused startup adherents, Ampere Computing, go | Continue reading
To Gerrit Kazmaier, the distinction between managed databases and data lakes has never made much sense, and it makes even less sense today as data is | Continue reading
To a certain extent, the only thing that really matters in a computing system is what changes in its memory, and to that extent, this is what makes | Continue reading
For those looking to try out Fujitsu’s Arm-based PRIMEHPC FX1000 system, the company is opening up the same capabilities via its own cloud service. Access | Continue reading
Wouldn’t it be funny if Google ends up being the stalwart supporter of the X86 architecture among the hyperscalers and cloud builders? Amazon Web Services | Continue reading
There may not be as much structured data in the world as there is unstructured data, but one could easily argue that the structured data – mostly | Continue reading
With each passing generation of GPU accelerator engines from Nvidia, machine learning drives more and more of the architectural choices and changes and | Continue reading
Remember when only a couple of variations of processors were available for servers in any given generation of server CPUs? There might have been dozens of | Continue reading
It is the nature of capability class supercomputers to try to push the envelope on as many different architectural fronts as possible. The very purpose of | Continue reading
Here we are, on the Friday before the flagship GPU Technology Conference hosted by Nvidia is set to kick off. And we are without a doubt excited in | Continue reading
When any new abstraction layer comes to compute, it can only think in integers at first, and then it learns to do fractions and finally, if we are lucky – | Continue reading
Over the past decade, much of the focus with machine learning has been on CPUs and accelerators, primarily GPUs but also custom ASICs, with advances in | Continue reading
There are people who build big machines and then there are people who create the algorithms, libraries, and applications that harness them. At oil giant | Continue reading
If you need any proof that it doesn’t take the most advanced chip manufacturing processes to create an exascale-class supercomputer, you need look no | Continue reading
There is a lot of chatter this week about optical communications with the OFC2022 conference being held in San Diego. We have more than a passing interest | Continue reading
Some of the most important luminaries in the HPC sector have spoken from on high, and their conclusions about the future of the HPC market are probably | Continue reading
When it comes to memory for compute engines, FPGAs – or rather what we have started calling hybrid FPGAs because they have all kinds of hard coded logic | Continue reading
Since modern machine learning came onto the scene, the push has been on to make workloads leveraging the technologies as efficient as possible. Given what | Continue reading
Renee James knows about processors and she knows about the cloud. In a career at Intel that spanned more than 28 years and saw her rise to become | Continue reading
We are still chewing through some of the announcements that came out of Intel Investor Day and the ISSCC 2022 chip conference, and one of the things we | Continue reading
The metaverse is still a thing, an experience, a service in the making, an envisioned 3D world fueled in large part by artificial intelligence and | Continue reading
What is the most important product that comes out of the semiconductor industry? Here is a hint: It is inherent to the market, but enhanced by a | Continue reading
While there is a lot of hype, there is no question that quantum computers are going to revolutionize computing. But we are still in the early stages of | Continue reading
We were complaining a few weeks ago that Intel had not put out a server processor roadmap of any substance in a long time, and instead of just leaving it | Continue reading
In a relatively few short years, Kubernetes has become the de facto orchestration platform for managing software containers, besting a lineup that | Continue reading
Server virtualization has been around a long time, has come to different classes of machines and architectures over the decades to drive efficiency | Continue reading
Only two quarters ago, AMD’s datacenter business – meaning sales of Epyc CPUs plus Instinct GPU accelerators – broke through $1 billion. And it was a big | Continue reading
Not every manufacturing node comes out perfectly and not every one comes out on time, but in the past decade and a half, Taiwan Semiconductor | Continue reading
Around the world, the number and size of datacenters are both growing at a fast pace, and the devices housed in them are consuming more and more power as | Continue reading
The Graviton family of Arm server chips designed by the Annapurna Labs division of Amazon Web Services is arguably the highest volume Arm server chips the | Continue reading
The modern GPU compute engine is a microcosm of the high performance computing datacenter at large. At every level of HPC – across systems in the | Continue reading
It is always an exciting time when there is a new compute engine coming into the market, and interest is particularly keen with any new Arm server chip | Continue reading
At this point in supercomputing, it’s becoming an anomaly to see an upcoming double-digit petaflops system not using AMD for CPU and GPU but the National | Continue reading
There are no greater bragging rights in supercomputing than those that come with top ten listing on the bi-annual list of the world’s most powerful | Continue reading
If you want to know how and why AMD motors have been chosen for so many of the pre-exascale and exascale HPC and AI systems, despite the dominance of | Continue reading
Necessity is the mother of invention, and advances in chip packaging are catching up to those in transistor design when it comes to working in three | Continue reading
Database acceleration using specialized co-processors is nothing new. Just to give a few examples, data warehouses running on the Netezza platform, owned | Continue reading
Sometimes, you do put new wine in old bottles. This is what it looks like Meta – well, really its Facebook social network group – is doing as it adds a | Continue reading
While nothing can beat the notoriety of the long-standing LINPACK benchmark, the metric by which supercomputer performance is gauged, there is ample room | Continue reading
Just because Intel is no longer interested in being a prime contractor on the largest supercomputing deals in the United States and Europe – China and | Continue reading
Native CPU and accelerator architectures that have been in play on China's previous large systems have been stepped up to make China first to exascale on | Continue reading
Intel recently announced that High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) will be available on select “Sapphire Rapids” Xeon SP processors and will provide the CPU | Continue reading
Here are two things you don’t see every day in the realm of scientific and technical high performance computing. The first thing is seeing an organization | Continue reading
It may not seem like it, but Oracle is still in the high-end server business, at least when it comes to big machines running its eponymous relational | Continue reading
We are strong believers in disaggregation and composability here at The Next Platform, and we think that eventually the tyranny of the physical confines | Continue reading