Closing the books on 2017, Cray announced one of the worst financial reports in recent memory, reporting a net loss of $133.8 million. It marks the first time since 2009 that the company went into the red and represents the second worst net loss in its history.
Google has announced a beta program to make its in-house Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) available to cloud customers, marking the first time a custom-built machine learning chip will be accessible to a wide array of users.
Chip startup Lightmatter has received an infusion of $11 million from investors to help bring the worlds first silicon photonics processor for AI to market. Using technology originally developed at MIT, the company is promising orders of magnitude performance improvements over whats feasible using existing technologies.
According to a news report in Peoples Daily Online, China is planning to launch a pre-exascale supercomputer this year that could outperform Summit, a US machine developed for the Department of Energy that is expected to top 200 petaflops when deployed later this year.
The Department of Energy (DOE) is soliciting proposals for research projects that will receive early access to Aurora, the first exascale supercomputer to be deployed in the US. Theres one catch though: the DOE is not telling anyone about machines architecture.
A consortium of European and Brazilian organizations dedicated to pushing the boundaries of HPC for the energy sector has released a report on how exascale computing will be needed to move the industry forward.
The European Commission (EC) has announced a financial framework for investing 1 billion in European supercomputers over the next two years. Under this framework, known as the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, the European Union (EU) would contribute around 486 million, while the remainder would be supplied by EU member states and associated countries.
Two recently uncovered security problems that affect nearly every CPU on the planet have forced companies to issue fixes that could seriously impact performance. While Intel has taken the brunt of bad press, chips supplied by AMD, IBM, and ARM vendors are also affected.
Chris Downing, senior consultant at Red Oak Consulting, takes a look at what's ahead for high performance computing in the coming year. In particular, he focuses on what's in store for some of the major HPC suppliers AMD, Nvidia, Intel, and niche hardware providers as well as the prospects for cloud computing.
The past 12 months encompassed a number of new developments in HPC, as well as an intensification of existing trends. TOP500 News takes a look at the top eight hits and misses of 2017.
