December 10, 2021

HPCwire catches up with SiPearl's Craig Prunty at SC21. They discuss SiPearl's role in developing foundational European exascale technology, recently announced partnerships with Intel and Graphcore and what's next for the French company. Read more…

December 3, 2021

For a long time, the promised in-person SC21 seemed like an impossible fever dream, the assurances of a prominent physical component persisting across years of canceled conferences, including two virtual ISCs and the virtual SC20. With the advent of the Delta variant, Covid surges in St. Louis and contention over vaccine requirements... Read more…

December 2, 2021

“This is the 30th Green500,” said Wu Feng, custodian of the Green500 list, at the list’s SC21 birds-of-a-feather session. “You could say 15 years of Green500, which makes it, I guess, the crystal anniversary.” Indeed, HPCwire marked the 15th anniversary of the Green500 – which ranks supercomputers by flops-per-watt, rather than just by flops – earlier this year with... Read more…

November 30, 2021

HPC is entering a new era: exascale is (somewhat) officially here, but Moore’s law is ending. Power consumption and other sustainability concerns loom over the enormous systems and chips of this new epoch, for both cost and compliance reasons. Reconciling the need to continue the supercomputer scale-up while reducing HPC’s environmental impacts... Read more…

November 29, 2021

HPCwire's Managing Editor sits down with Intel's Raja Koduri and Riken's Satoshi Matsuoka in St. Louis for an off-the-cuff conversation about their SC21 experience, what comes after exascale and why they are collaborating. Koduri, senior vice president and general manager of Intel's accelerated computing systems and graphics (AXG) group, leads the team... Read more…

November 29, 2021

HPCwire's Managing Editor sits down with Jack Dongarra, Top500 co-founder and Distinguished Professor at the University of Tennessee, during SC21 in St. Louis to discuss the 2021 Top500 list, the outlook for global exascale computing, and what exactly is going on in that Viking helmet photo. Read more…

November 26, 2021

Larry Smarr, founding director of Calit2 (now Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of California San Diego) and the first director of NCSA, is one of the seminal figures in the U.S. supercomputing community. What began as a personal drive, shared by others, to spur the creation of supercomputers in the U.S. for scientific use, later expanded into a... Read more…

November 24, 2021

Details about two previously rumored Chinese exascale systems came to light during last week’s SC21 proceedings. Asked about these systems during the Top500 media briefing on Monday, Nov. 15, list author and co-founder Jack Dongarra indicated he was aware of some very impressive results, but withheld comment when asked directly if he had... Read more…

November 19, 2021

SC21 may have been the first major supercomputing conference to return to in-person activities, but not everything returned to the live menu: the Student Cluster Competition – held virtually at ISC 2020, SC20 and ISC 2021 – was again held virtually at SC21. Nevertheless, Students@SC Chair Jay Lofstead took the physical stage at SC21 on Thursday to announce the... Read more…

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 18, 2021

For the second (and, hopefully, final) year in a row, SC21 included a second major research award alongside the ACM 2021 Gordon Bell Prize: the Gordon Bell Special Prize for High Performance Computing-Based COVID-19 Research. Last year, the first iteration of this award went to simulations of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein; this year, the prize went... Read more…

November 18, 2021

Today at the hybrid virtual/in-person SC21 conference, the organizers announced the winners of the 2021 ACM Gordon Bell Prize: a team of Chinese researchers leveraging the new exascale Sunway system to simulate quantum circuits. The Gordon Bell Prize, which comes with an award of $10,000 courtesy of HPC pioneer Gordon Bell, is awarded annually... 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 17, 2021

Since coming online in the fall of 2019 in Paris, the Jean Zay supercomputer has been one of Europe’s most powerful supercomputers available to HPC and AI researchers. And now, through the addition of new Nvidia A100 80GB GPUs and other hardware, the Jean Zay will soon offer double the compute capacity it offers for AI and HPC research, according to GENCI... Read more…

November 17, 2021

As the panelists gathered onstage for SC21’s first plenary talk, the so-called Peter Parker principle – “with great power comes great responsibility” – cycled across the background slideshow. For the following hour, five panelists confronted this dilemma: with the transformative power of HPC (and, in particular, HPC-enabled AI) increasingly mainstreamed and deployed by all major... 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

HPE – working with France’s HPC agency, GENCI, and its National Computing Center for Higher Education, CINES – announced a stellar win today at SC21: it will build France’s 70 peak petaflops Adastra supercomputer, scheduling another leading system for delivery in Europe on the heels of a string of EuroHPC system debuts. The system, slated for delivery and... 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 15, 2021

Power plants are both crucial and mercurial; the whims of wind speeds, light availability, ambient temperatures and equipment failures can, under the wrong circ Read more…

November 11, 2021

Nvidia is continuing to expand enterprise digital twin capabilities and features in its Nvidia Omniverse 3D virtual world design platform, but the company’s n Read more…

November 11, 2021

C21 has introduced the SC21 HUBB for remote participants and attendees of the conference. SC21 will support both in-person attendees at the America’s Center in St. Louis and remote attendees through the SC21 HUBB. Users who log onto the SC21 HUBB will have access to the following... Read more…

November 10, 2021

It was with a hint of nostalgia that Argonne Lab’s Bill Allcock described the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility’s (ALCF) decision to switch to a commercially-supported workload management suite after 20+ years spent developing and using ALCF’s custom workload manager, Cobalt. Argonne National Laboratory announced today that it is deploying Altair PBS Professional across the organization’s HPC systems and clusters. “From the inception of ALCF, we wrote our own scheduler called Cobalt... Read more…

November 10, 2021

In March 2020, the near-term future of the high-performance computing market was suddenly thrust, like so many things, into turmoil and uncertainty. Intersect36 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... Read more…

November 5, 2021

In advance of the SC21 conference, taking place in St. Louis and online November 14-19, HPCwire interviewed two of the people leading the effort to put on the 34th annual – and first hybrid – SC. In this special video interview with HPCwire, Bronis de Supinski, SC21 Conference General Chair, and Jeff Hollingsworth, Conference Vice Chair, discuss this year’s unique format, the unifying theme... Read more…

October 21, 2021

AMD’s next-generation supercomputer GPU is on its way – and by all appearances, it’s about to make a name for itself. The AMD Radeon Instinct MI200 GPU (a successor to the MI100) will, over the next year, begin to power three massive systems on three continents: the United States’ exascale Frontier system; the European Union’s pre-exascale LUMI system; and Australia’s petascale Setonix system. Read more…

October 13, 2021

The Intersection of Ethics and HPC will be the guiding topic of SC21's Science & Beyond plenary, inspired by the event tagline of the same name. The evening Read more…

October 12, 2021

The SC21 Invited Talks will be held over three days starting on Nov. 16 through Nov. 18, 2021, in St. Louis, Missouri. The SC21 team has provided a l Read more…