News

Category – In Depth

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AMD Challenges Intels Datacenter Dominance with New EPYC Processors
June 22, 2017
For the first time in several years, AMD has brought a server chip to market that provides some real competition to Intel and its near total domination of the datacenter market. The new AMD silicon, known as the EPYC 7000 series processors, come with up to 32 cores, along with a number of features that offer some useful differentiation against its Xeon competition.

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New MareNostrum Supercomputer Reflects Processor Choices Confronting HPC Users
June 20, 2017
The fourth-generation MareNostrum supercomputer is up and running at the Barcelona Supercomputer Centre (BSC), or at last the first phase of it is. When completed, it will contain the most interesting medley of processors of any supercomputer in existence. We asked Sergi Girona, Director of Operations at BSC, to describe the makeup of the new system and explain the rationale for building such a diverse machine.

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Swiss Deploy Worlds Fastest GPU-Powered Supercomputer
June 19, 2017
The recent upgrade to the Piz Daint supercomputer at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), has thrust the machine into limelight here at the ISC High Performance conference on opening day. The Cray XC50 system turned in a Linpack result of 19.6 petaflops, which was good enough to capture the number three spot on the latest TOP500 list, and displace Titan, the former GPU supercomputing champ, running at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

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Lustre Architect Peter Braam Talks About His Latest Venture
June 14, 2017
In 1999, Peter Braam introduced Lustre, an open-source parallel file system which went on to become one the most popular software packages for supercomputing. Braams success with Lustre was just the start of a career in which he founded five companies and guided technology development in numerous others -- Sun Microsystem, Red Hat, and Xyratex, among them. Hes currently working with Cambridge University on the Square Kilometer Array project and its Science Data Processor effort.

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Tracking the Worlds Top Storage Systems
June 12, 2017
When assessing the fastest supercomputers in the world, system performance is king, while the I/O componentry that feeds these computational beasts often escapes notice. But a small group of storage devotees working on a project at the Virtual Institute for I/O (VI4IO) want to change that.

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New Five Nanometer Transistor Unveiled by IBM and Cohorts
June 5, 2017
IBM and its partners have developed a novel technology to build 5nm chips, based on silicon nanosheet transistors. Compared to 10nm chips using FinFET transistors, the new technology promises to deliver a 40 percent performance increase, a 75 percent power savings, or some combination of the two.

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NVIDIA Amps Up AI Cloud Strategy with ODM Partnerships
June 1, 2017
NVIDIA is hooking up with four of the worlds largest original design manufacturers (ODMs) to help accelerate adoption of its GPUs into hyperscale datacenters. The new partner program would give Foxconn, Inventec, Quanta and Wistron early access to the HGX reference architecture, NVIDIAs server design for machine learning acceleration.

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Google and IBM Battle for Quantum Supremacy
May 29, 2017
Building a quantum computer that can outperform conventional systems on certain types of algorithms looks to be tantalizingly close. As it stands today, Google and IBM appear to be the most likely candidates to claim that achievement.