Putting Things in Perspective

By Michael Feldman

June 30, 2006

Thanks to this week's International Supercomputing Conference (ISC) in Dresden, Germany, today's issue of HPCwire is one of the largest of the year. ISC always seems to put a charge into the HPC community and this year was no exception. Here's a rundown on some of this issue's highlights as well as some pointers to a few exceptional articles from our special ISC coverage on Wednesday and Thursday.

If you're wondering where to begin, I encourage you to start with Thomas Sterling's supercomputing retrospective of the past year — that is, June 2005 to June 2006. When you live and die for HPC, you celebrate the New Year on a slightly different schedule than the rest of the world. Thomas offers an insightful wrap-up of the most important supercomputing developments since last summer. He discusses multi-core evolution, the rising interest in heterogeneous architectures, and offers his own “State-of-the-Petaflops” address.

Also be sure to catch John Gustafson's perspective on the escalating energy crisis in supercomputing. John is the CTO of HPC at ClearSpeed, a company that knows a few things about energy-efficient high performance computing. The article is full of wit and wisdom. I highly recommend it.

Our feature interview this week is with Chuck Seitz, CEO and founder of Myricom. In talking with Chuck on many occasions over the last few months, I've come to realize that he's one of the real visionaries in HPC today. In our Q&A, Chuck describes some of the latest Myricom offerings, offers his thoughts on Microsoft's cluster computing solution, and gives us his take on the Ethernet versus Ethernot (specialty networks) debates.

If you missed Thurday's special coverage of ISC, be sure to go back and read Reiner Hartenstein's piece on Reconfigurable Computing. Hartenstein, a professor at TU Kaiserslautern in Germany, believes that FPGAs, and the paradigm they bring with them, is a game-changing model for supercomputing. He challenges system designers to alter their way of thinking about building next-generation HPC platforms. Here's an excerpt:

“… just putting more CPUs on the chip is not the way to go for very high performance. We have learned this lesson from the supercomputing community, which has paid an extremely high price for monstrous installations by following the wrong road map for decades.”

In that same ISC issue from Thursday, be sure to read our Q&A with Alexander Reinefeld, who also talks about FPGAs. He's less confrontational than Hartenstein and offers some very worthwhile insights. Don't miss the Alan Turing quote at the end of the interview.

In Wednesday's special coverage of ISC, I'd like to point out a couple of special articles.

The first one is our interview with Horst Simon. In this Q&A, he talks about the challenges involved in obtaining meaningful petaflops performance, touching on some of the issues I talked about in last week's editorial commentary. Here's an excerpt that sums up Simon's concerns about petaflops myopia:

“… if in all this enthusiasm we settle for just the easy goals, such as the first peak or Linpack petaflop performance, we may have a “petaflop before its time.” Once the peak and Linpack milestones are achieved in 2008 or so, the real hard work begins, the work of achieving petaflop performance in production computing environments.”

Also in the Wednesday ISC issue, be sure to read Stephen Wheat's perspective on the Top500 list and the associated Linpack benchmark. Wheat, the Senior Director of Intel's HPC Platform Office, argues that the HPC world has grown too complex to rely on just a single metric anymore. From his point of view, many industry vendors and end-users are also reaching this conclusion. So what will we use to take the place of Linpack? Wheat sees no easy answers, but suggests that the new metrics will have to account for the growing diversity of the high performance computing market.

News this week

Too much HPC news to talk about. Every HPC vendor and analyst had something to say this week. What follows are just some of the announcements that caught my eye.
 
On Monday, Intel officially released its dual-core Xeon Processor 5100 series (formally code-named Woodcrest). Most of the usual OEM suspects had already announced they would be building platforms based out the new Intel server chip. However, this week SGI announced a new Altix XE cluster line based on the 5100 series chips. This is a first for SGI, which in the past has focused almost exclusively on high-end systems for the technical computing market. The new cluster line is part of the company's new strategy to make inroads into the enterprise space. Along with their existing Itanium-based Altix lines, SGI has apparently committed itself to be an Intel-only shop, at least for the time being.

HP introduced its new blade system solution for HPC at ISC this week. The blades support a 20 Gbps InfiniBand interconnect, twice as fast as the current IBM BladeCenter cluster systems. With the InfiniBand (IB) ecosystem moving from 10 to 20 Gbps, the IB vendors look like they're trying to get some bandwidth distance between their latest offerings and 10 Gigabit Ethernet solutions, which recently have approached InfiniBand's low latency performance using a variety of clever technologies. All of these increases in interconnect performance should make cluster platforms even more attractive than they are today.

IDC seems to think so too. On Wednesday, during the company's analyst briefing at ISC, research VP Christopher Willard predicted that by 2010 cluster systems will account for 75 to 85 percent of all high performance technical computing revenue (unless a major new disruptive technology comes along). The article goes on to describe some of the other factors that will effect cluster adoption.

Here are my predictions: By 2015 clusters will become the most common form of residential and commercial heating in the U.S. And by 2020, there will so many clusters in the world, there won't be any room for IT marketing executives. I didn't do any actual research to reach these conclusions; it's just wishful thinking.

Until next week…

—–

As always, comments about HPCwire are welcomed and encouraged. Write to me, Michael Feldman, at [email protected].

Subscribe to HPCwire's Weekly Update!

Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industry updates delivered to you every week!

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion XL — were added to the benchmark suite as MLPerf continues Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing power it brings to artificial intelligence.  Nvidia's DGX Read more…

Call for Participation in Workshop on Potential NSF CISE Quantum Initiative

March 26, 2024

Editor’s Note: Next month there will be a workshop to discuss what a quantum initiative led by NSF’s Computer, Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate could entail. The details are posted below in a Ca Read more…

Waseda U. Researchers Reports New Quantum Algorithm for Speeding Optimization

March 25, 2024

Optimization problems cover a wide range of applications and are often cited as good candidates for quantum computing. However, the execution time for constrained combinatorial optimization applications on quantum device Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at the network layer threatens to make bigger and brawnier pro Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HBM3E memory as well as the the ability to train 1 trillion pa Read more…

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing po Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HB Read more…

Nvidia Looks to Accelerate GenAI Adoption with NIM

March 19, 2024

Today at the GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia launched a new offering aimed at helping customers quickly deploy their generative AI applications in a secure, s Read more…

The Generative AI Future Is Now, Nvidia’s Huang Says

March 19, 2024

We are in the early days of a transformative shift in how business gets done thanks to the advent of generative AI, according to Nvidia CEO and cofounder Jensen Read more…

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, codenamed Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from Read more…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. Wh Read more…

Alibaba Shuts Down its Quantum Computing Effort

November 30, 2023

In case you missed it, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba has shut down its quantum computing research effort. It’s not entirely clear what drove the change. Read more…

Nvidia H100: Are 550,000 GPUs Enough for This Year?

August 17, 2023

The GPU Squeeze continues to place a premium on Nvidia H100 GPUs. In a recent Financial Times article, Nvidia reports that it expects to ship 550,000 of its lat Read more…

Shutterstock 1285747942

AMD’s Horsepower-packed MI300X GPU Beats Nvidia’s Upcoming H200

December 7, 2023

AMD and Nvidia are locked in an AI performance battle – much like the gaming GPU performance clash the companies have waged for decades. AMD has claimed it Read more…

DoD Takes a Long View of Quantum Computing

December 19, 2023

Given the large sums tied to expensive weapon systems – think $100-million-plus per F-35 fighter – it’s easy to forget the U.S. Department of Defense is a Read more…

Synopsys Eats Ansys: Does HPC Get Indigestion?

February 8, 2024

Recently, it was announced that Synopsys is buying HPC tool developer Ansys. Started in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1970 as Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. (SASI) by John Swanson (and eventually renamed), Ansys serves the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering)/multiphysics engineering simulation market. Read more…

Choosing the Right GPU for LLM Inference and Training

December 11, 2023

Accelerating the training and inference processes of deep learning models is crucial for unleashing their true potential and NVIDIA GPUs have emerged as a game- Read more…

Intel’s Server and PC Chip Development Will Blur After 2025

January 15, 2024

Intel's dealing with much more than chip rivals breathing down its neck; it is simultaneously integrating a bevy of new technologies such as chiplets, artificia Read more…

Baidu Exits Quantum, Closely Following Alibaba’s Earlier Move

January 5, 2024

Reuters reported this week that Baidu, China’s giant e-commerce and services provider, is exiting the quantum computing development arena. Reuters reported � Read more…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

Comparing NVIDIA A100 and NVIDIA L40S: Which GPU is Ideal for AI and Graphics-Intensive Workloads?

October 30, 2023

With long lead times for the NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs, many organizations are looking at the new NVIDIA L40S GPU, which it’s a new GPU optimized for AI and g Read more…

Shutterstock 1179408610

Google Addresses the Mysteries of Its Hypercomputer 

December 28, 2023

When Google launched its Hypercomputer earlier this month (December 2023), the first reaction was, "Say what?" It turns out that the Hypercomputer is Google's t Read more…

AMD MI3000A

How AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat

October 5, 2023

When discussing GenAI, the term "GPU" almost always enters the conversation and the topic often moves toward performance and access. Interestingly, the word "GPU" is assumed to mean "Nvidia" products. (As an aside, the popular Nvidia hardware used in GenAI are not technically... Read more…

Shutterstock 1606064203

Meta’s Zuckerberg Puts Its AI Future in the Hands of 600,000 GPUs

January 25, 2024

In under two minutes, Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, laid out the company's AI plans, which included a plan to build an artificial intelligence system with the eq Read more…

Google Introduces ‘Hypercomputer’ to Its AI Infrastructure

December 11, 2023

Google ran out of monikers to describe its new AI system released on December 7. Supercomputer perhaps wasn't an apt description, so it settled on Hypercomputer Read more…

China Is All In on a RISC-V Future

January 8, 2024

The state of RISC-V in China was discussed in a recent report released by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The report, entitled "E Read more…

Intel Won’t Have a Xeon Max Chip with New Emerald Rapids CPU

December 14, 2023

As expected, Intel officially announced its 5th generation Xeon server chips codenamed Emerald Rapids at an event in New York City, where the focus was really o Read more…

IBM Quantum Summit: Two New QPUs, Upgraded Qiskit, 10-year Roadmap and More

December 4, 2023

IBM kicks off its annual Quantum Summit today and will announce a broad range of advances including its much-anticipated 1121-qubit Condor QPU, a smaller 133-qu Read more…

  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire