October 26, 2020

Launched in late 2015 and transitioned to a Linux Foundation Project in 2016, OpenHPC has marched quietly but steadily forward. Its goal “to provide a referen Read more…

November 1, 2018

You may recall at SC15 an Intel-led group introduced OpenHPC – an effort to build a community project around an open source, plug-and-play HPC stack. One goal Read more…

January 25, 2017

Perhaps ‘heresies’ is a bit strong, but HPC in the cloud, even for academics, is a fast-changing domain that’s increasingly governed by a new mindset, says Tim Carroll, head of ecosystem development and sales at Cycle Computing, an early pioneer in HPC cloud orchestration and provisioning software. The orthodoxy of the past – an emphatic focus on speeds and feeds, if you will – is being erased by changing researcher attitudes and the advancing capabilities of public (AWS, Microsoft, Google et al.) and private (Penguin, et al.) clouds. Read more…

January 19, 2017

France’s CEA and Japan’s RIKEN institute announced a multi-faceted five-year collaboration to advance HPC generally and prepare for exascale computing. Among the particulars are efforts to: build out the ARM ecosystem; work on code development and code sharing on the existing and future platforms; share expertise in specific application areas (material and seismic sciences for example); improve techniques for using numerical simulation with big data; and expand HPC workforce training. It seems to be a very full agenda. Read more…

January 18, 2017

It’s been a heady two weeks for the ARM HPC advocacy camp. At this week’s Mont-Blanc Project meeting held at the Barcelona Supercomputer Center, Cray announced plans to build an ARM-based supercomputer in the U.K. while Mont-Blanc selected Cavium’s ThunderX2 ARM chip for its third phase of development. Last week, France’s CEA and Japan’s Riken announced a deep collaboration aimed largely at fostering the ARM ecosystem. This activity follows a busy 2016 when SoftBank acquired ARM, OpenHPC announced ARM support, ARM released its SVE spec, Fujistu chose ARM for the post K machine, and ARM acquired HPC tool provider Allinea in December. Read more…

December 23, 2016

Some years quietly sneak by – 2016 not so much. It’s safe to say there are always forces reshaping the HPC landscape but this year’s bunch seemed like a noisy lot. Among the noisemakers: TaihuLight, DGX-1/Pascal, Dell EMC & HPE-SGI et al., KNL to market, OPA-IB chest thumping, Fujitsu-ARM, new U.S. President-elect, BREXIT, JR’s Intel Exit, Exascale (whatever that means now), [email protected], whither NSCI, Deep Learning mania, HPC identity crisis…You get the picture. Read more…

November 10, 2016

Perhaps stealing a bit of OpenHPC’s SC16 thunder, ARM announced today that ARMv8-A will be the first alternative architecture with OpenHPC support and part of Read more…

October 24, 2016

At SC15 last year the announcement of OpenHPC – the nascent effort to develop a standardized HPC stack to ease HPC deployment – drew a mix of enthusiasm and wariness; the latter in part because of Intel’s prominence in the group. There was general agreement that creating an open source, plug-and-play HPC stack was a good idea. Read more…