While a number of commentators have written off AMD’s prospects of competing against Intel in HPC, testing of the latest server silicon from each chipmaker has revealed that the EPYC chip offers some surprising performance advantages against Intel’s newest "Skylake" Xeon destined for the datacenter.
NVIDIA has donated 15 V100 Tesla GPUs to researchers attending the recent Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in Honolulu. The giveaway was described in a blog posted by the company on July 22.
A number of news outlets in India are reporting the government is close to deploying six new supercomputers, two of which will deliver a peak performance of two petaflops.
Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) has deployed a Dell EMC supercomputer outfitted with NVIDIA’s P100 GPUs. The system, known as “Bracewell,” will nearly double the computational power available to CSIRO researchers.
WekaIO, a startup offering a cloud-based storage platform that can support exabytes of data in single namespace, emerged from stealth earlier this week. The company is touting the new product as “the world’s fastest distributed file system.”
One of the more significant architectural advancements in Intel’s new Xeon scalable processor, aka Skylake, is the use of a mesh interconnect that link cores and other on-chip componentry.
Mellanox has entered new territory with its recently announced Spectrum-2 line of Ethernet switches, which supports speeds of 200 gigabits per second and beyond.
A report published by James Kisner, an equity analyst at global investment banking firm Jeffries, shot a few holes in IBM’s Watson and the company’s cognitive computing strategy. Along the way, Kisner offered some interesting insights into the AI market and some of the major players competing in the space.
After already shipping more than half a million of its next-generation Xeon products to customers, Intel officially launched its new Xeon scalable processor product line. The chipmaker is calling it the “biggest data center advancement in a decade.”
Japanese computer-maker Fujitsu is developing an AI-specific microprocessor called the Deep Learning Unit (DLU). The company’s goal is to produce a chip that delivers 10 times better performance per watt than the competition.
For all the supercomputing trends revealed on recent TOP500 lists, the most worrisome is the decline in performance growth that has taken place over the over the last several years – worrisome not only because performance is the lifeblood of the HPC industry, but also because there is no definitive cause of the slowdown.