AMD has flirted with the idea of building big brawny APUs for servers ever since the company starting developing the CPU-GPU hybrid chips begin back in 2006. Combining x86 and Radeon silicon on the same die for desktops and laptops was the basis for AMDs original Fusion processor, later renamed as the Accelerated Processing Unit (APU). Now with the anticipation of the next-generation Zen CPU core and the future Vega GPU, it looks like a high-performance server APU could finally become a reality.

Network latency and bandwidth often turn out to be choke points on application performance for many HPC codes. As a result, the network component for HPC systems has successfully resisted the trend toward general-purpose solutions, Ethernet notwithstanding. Such an environment is conducive to greater innovation and experimentation, as is exemplified in EXTOLLs network technology

More than a hundred high-profile leaders from Silicon Valley and the broader IT community have published an open letter warning voters that a Donald Trump presidency would be a catastrophefor American technology leadership. The letter was signed by 145 inventors, entrepreneurs, engineers, investors, researchers, and business leaders working in the US technology sector.

The European Union is funding a number of HPC projects that are exploring different hardware and software technologies for exascale computing. One of these, known as DEEP-ER, expands on the notion of the Cluster-Booster architecture of its predecessor, the DEEP project. Using a mix of European HPC technologies from German, Italy and elsewhere, DEEP-ER is exploring some of the thornier issues of exascale, in particular, I/O scalability and system resiliency.

In an industry as forward-leaning as high performance computing, the focus on exascale and buying machines with the maximum amount of FLOPS hardware can be a distraction. The average HPC user is just looking to find the best performance possible for their applications with the hardware at hand. And in more cases than we would like to think, sometimes that hardware is just a personal computer.

The well-worn adage that a picture is worth a thousand words rings true when communicating the importance, content, and yes, the beauty that is uncovered as researchers explore how the brain works. Given that humans are wired to understand images faster and better than other forms of communication, brain research highlights the importance of scientific visualization

If ROSS was an actual human, he would certainly be the highest paid legal assistant in history. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of legal texts, and devours new ones quickly and effortlessly. Better yet, he can work seven days a week, 24 hours a day, and requires no office supplies, health insurance or retirement programs. Yes, ROSS is a computer program and his designation as a male is just one of convenience.

One of the most popular sessions at last weeks ISC High Performance conference was titled "Scaling Beyond the End of Moores Law," which was a series of three talks that delved into some of the technology options that could reanimate computing after CMOS hits the wall sometime in the next decade. The subjects popularity is unsurprising, given that the supercomputing digerati that attend this event are probably more obsessed with Moores two-year cadence of transistor shrinkage than any other group of people on the planet.

ARM has been something of stealth architecture in the battle to unseat the x86 as the dominant platform for high performance computing systems. That lower profile changed this week at the ISC 2016 conference, where Fujitsu announced it would develop an ARM processor for its Post-K exascale supercomputer. But the effort promises to have much a wider impact on the HPC landscape than just a single system.

Intels much-awaited Knights Landing Xeon Phi processor is now being shipped in volume to OEMs and other system providers, who will soon be churning out HPC gear equipped with the new chip. And if there was any doubt, Intel made it clear that with Knights Landing, it would be going after the same set of HPC and deep learning customers that NVIDIA has been successfully courting with its Tesla GPU portfolio. The official launch of the new processor was announced at the ISC High Performance conference (ISC), which is taking place this week in Frankfurt.