HPC
With both GDC and GTC going on this week, this is a big time for GPUs of all sorts. And today, AMD wants to get in on the game as well, with the release of the PCIe version of their MI200 accelerator family, the MI210. First unveiled alongside the MI250 and MI250X back in November, when AMD initially launched the Instinct MI200 family, the MI210 is the third and final member of AMD’s latest generation of GPU-based accelerators. Bringing the CDNA 2 architecture into a PCIe card, the MI210 is being aimed at customers who are after the MI200 family’s HPC and machine learning performance, but need it in a standardized form factor for mainstream servers. Overall, the MI200 is being launched widely today as...
US Dept. of Energy Announces Frontier Supercomputer: Cray and AMD to Build 1.5 Exaflop Machine
The history of the computing industry is one of constant progress. Processors get faster, storage gets cheaper, and memory gets denser. We see the repercussions of this advancement through...
77 by Ryan Smith on 5/7/2019TACC Frontera: Targeting 210W Next-Gen Xeons and Extreme Performance
The Frontera supercomputer is the next generation high performance machine set to debut at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC). As part of Intel’s HPC Forum, being held just...
9 by Ian Cutress on 11/12/2018Intel Offers More Cascade Lake-AP Performance Numbers
One of the announcements from last week involved Intel and its new Cascade Lake Advanced Performance category of processors to launch next year. These new processors will be based...
52 by Ian Cutress on 11/11/2018Hot Chips 2018: Fujitsu's A64FX Arm Core Live Blog
Remember back when Arm announced Scalable Vector Extensions? Well Fujitsu has made an Arm CPU that uses it with a 512-bit width. The presentation looks super interesting, so follow...
9 by Dr. Ian Cutress on 8/21/2018Samsung Kicks Off Mass Production of 64GB RDIMMs Using 16Gbit Chips
Back in March, Samsung first demonstrated their next-generation 64GB DDR4 Registered DIMMs. Based on Samsung’s new 16Gbit DDR4 memory chips, these new RDIMMs would offer 64GB of memory capacity...
7 by Ryan Smith on 6/11/2018Cray Adds AMD EPYC Processors to CS500 Cluster Supercomputers
Cray this week announced plans to offer AMD’s EPYC-based CS500 cluster supercomputers later this year. The Cray CS500 clusters will be based on ultra-dense 2-way servers each featuring up...
10 by Anton Shilov on 4/19/2018NVIDIA Develops NVLink Switch: NVSwitch, 18 Ports For DGX-2 & More
Back in 2016 when NVIDIA launched the Pascal GP100 GPU and associated Tesla cards, one of the consequences of their increased server focus for Pascal was that interconnect bandwidth...
22 by Ryan Smith on 3/27/2018Cheap Supercomputers: LANL has 750-node Raspberry Pi Development Clusters
One of the more esoteric announcements to come out of SuperComputing 17, an annual conference on high-performance computing, is that one of the largest US scientific institutions is investing...
26 by Ian Cutress on 11/14/2017PathForward: US Dept. of Energy Awards $258M in Research Contracts To Develop Exascale Supercomputer Technology
Even though the major US national laboratories are just now starting to take delivery of the supercomputers they ordered a few years back, due to the long and complex...
22 by Ryan Smith on 6/15/2017AMD @ SC16: Radeon Open Compute Platform (ROCm) 1.3 Released, Boltzmann Comes to Fruition
Kicking off this week is SC, the annual ACM/IEEE sponsored supercomputing conference in the United States. At this show last year, AMD announced the Boltzmann Initiative, their ambitious plan...
11 by Ryan Smith on 11/14/2016New ARM IP Launched: CMN-600 Interconnect for 128 Cores and DMC-620, an 8Ch DDR4 IMC
You need much more than a good CPU core to conquer the server world. As more cores are added, the way data moves from one part of the silicon...
14 by Johan De Gelas on 9/27/2016ARM Research Summit 2016 Keynote Live Blog
ARM's first Research Summit is happening today at Churchill College, Cambridge. We have near-front row seats and are expecting some details on future HPC plans today. Dr Chris Doran...
8 by Ian Cutress on 9/15/2016ARM Announces ARM v8-A with Scalable Vector Extensions: Aiming for HPC and Data Center
Today ARM is announcing an update to their line of architecture license products. With the goal of moving ARM more into the server, the data center, and high-performance computing...
15 by Ian Cutress on 8/22/2016Intel Announces Knights Mill: A Xeon Phi For Deep Learning
In a brief announcement as part of today’s Day 2 ketnote for IDF 2016, Intel has announced a new member of the Xeon Phi family. The new part, currently...
24 by Ryan Smith on 8/17/2016IBM, NVIDIA and Wistron Develop New OpenPOWER HPC Server with POWER8 CPUs
IBM, NVIDIA and Wistron have introduced their second-generation server for high-performance computing (HPC) applications at the OpenPOWER Summit. The new machine is designed for IBM’s latest POWER8 microprocessors, NVIDIA’s...
50 by Anton Shilov on 4/6/2016NVIDIA Unveils the DGX-1 HPC Server: 8 Teslas, 3U, Q2 2016
For a few years now, NVIDIA has been flirting with the server business as a means of driving the growth of datacenter sales of their products. A combination of...
31 by Ryan Smith & Ian Cutress on 4/6/2016AMD Announces FirePro S9300 X2: Dual Fiji for HPC
One of the more interesting consequences of GPUs being built on TSMC’s 28nm process for an extended period of time is that it has forced both vendors to compensate...
19 by Ryan Smith on 3/31/2016SuperComputing 15: Intel’s Knights Landing / Xeon Phi Silicon on Display
There are lots of stories to tell from the SuperComputing 15 conference here in Austin, but a clear overriding theme – in order to reach ‘Exascale’ (the fancy name...
26 by Ian Cutress on 11/19/2015A Few Notes on Intel’s Knights Landing and MCDRAM Modes from SC15
When learning about new hardware, there are always different angles to look at it. For the most part, manufacturers talking to the media will focus on the hardware aspects...
10 by Ian Cutress on 11/16/2015Exploring Intel’s Omni-Path Network Fabric
For several months now we have been talking about Intel’s Omni-Path network fabric, the company’s next-generation 100Gbps netwoking fabric technology. Typically Omni-Path has come up alongside discussions of Intel’s...
16 by Ryan Smith on 8/26/2015