November 19, 2021

Earlier this week MLCommons issued results from its latest MLPerf HPC training benchmarking exercise. Unlike other MLPerf benchmarks, which mostly measure the t Read more…

November 17, 2021

Unlike the deep technical dives of many SC keynotes, Internet pioneer Vint Cerf steered clear of the trenches and took leisurely stroll through a range of human-machine interactions, touching on ML’s growing capabilities while noting potholes to be avoided if possible. Cerf, of course, is co-designer with Bob Kahn of the TCP/IP protocols and architecture of the internet. He’s heralded... Read more…

November 15, 2021

Hyperion Research delivered its annual HPC market update at SC21 today. Much of it echoed Hyperion’s earlier mid-year report: the 2020 HPC market (on-premise) finished around $28B slightly up (~1.1 percent), roughly what was forecast in June. The gain was mostly due to the early standing-up of Fugaku. Read more…

November 15, 2021

No exascale for you* -- at least, not within the High-Performance Linpack (HPL) territory of the latest Top500 list, issued today from the 33rd annual Supercomputing Conference (SC21), held in-person in St. Louis, Mo., and virtually, from Nov. 14–19. "We were hoping to have the first exascale system on this list but that didn’t happen," said Top500 co-author... Read more…

November 15, 2021

At SC21 today, Xilinx launched its most powerful FPGA-based accelerator card – the Alveo U55C – specifically targeting HPC workloads and the datacenter. FPGAs (field programmable gate arrays) have a long productive history as customized accelerator chips used in many embedded applications. It’s only in the last few years that FPGA suppliers have begun... Read more…

November 10, 2021

Nvidia yesterday introduced Quantum-2, its new networking platform that features NDR InfiniBand (400 Gbps) and Bluefield-3 DPU (data processing unit) capabilities. The name is perhaps confusing – it’s not a quantum computing device and even Nvidia is getting into the true quantum computing market with its cuQuantum simulator. The name stems from the legacy line of Nvidia/Mellanox Quantum switches. That said, the new Quantum-2 platform specs are impressive. Jensen Huang, Nvidia CEO, introduced... Read more…

November 8, 2021

At a virtual event this morning, AMD CEO Lisa Su unveiled the company’s latest and much-anticipated server products: the new Milan-X CPU, which leverages AMD’s new 3D V-Cache technology; and its new Instinct MI200 GPU, which provides up to 220 compute units across two Infinity Fabric-connected dies, delivering an astounding 47.9 peak double-precision teraflops. “We're in a high-performance computing megacycle, driven by the growing need to deploy additional compute performance... Read more…

November 3, 2021

On October 1 of this year, IonQ became the first pure-play quantum computing start-up to go public. At this writing, the stock (NYSE: IONQ) was around $15 and its market capitalization was roughly $2.89 billion. Co-founder and chief scientist Chris Monroe says it was fun to have a few of the company’s roughly 100 employees travel to New York to ring the opening bell of the New York Stock... Read more…