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

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

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 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…