Burst buffers are carving out a significant space for themselves in the HPC arena as a way to improve data checkpointing and application performance at a time when traditional storage technologies are struggling to keep up with the increasingly large and complex workloads including traditional simulation and modeling and new things like as data analytics. …
The server race is really afoot now that IBM has finally gotten off the starting blocks with its first Power9 system, based on its “Nimbus” variant of that processor and turbocharged with the latest “Volta” Tesla GPU accelerators from Nvidia and EDR InfiniBand networks from Mellanox Technologies. …
For several years, GPU acceleration matched with Intel Xeon processors were the dominating news items in hardware at the annual Supercomputing Conference. …
Generally speaking, the world’s largest chip makers have been pretty secretive about the giant supercomputers they use to design and test their devices, although occasionally, Intel and AMD have provided some insight into their clusters. …
When it comes to HPC, compute is like the singers in a rock band, making all of the noise and soaking up most of the attention. …
The “Naples” Epyc server processors do not exactly present a new architecture from a new processor maker, but given the difficulties that AMD had at the tail end of the Opteron line a decade ago and its long dormancy in the server space, it is almost like AMD had to start back at the beginning to gain the trust of potential server buyers. …
Building the first exascale systems continues to be a high-profile endeavor, with efforts underway worldwide in the United States, the European Union, and Asia – notably China and Japan – that focus on competition between regional powers, the technologies that are going into the architectures, and the promises that these supercomputers hold for everything from research and government to business and commerce. …
Apparently, it’s Rivalry Week in the compute section of the datacenter here at The Next Platform. …
NVM-Express isn’t new. Development on the interface, which provides lean and mean access to non-volatile memory, first came to light a decade ago, with technical work starting two years later through a work group that comprised more than 90 tech vendors. …
It has been two years since chip maker Cavium rolled out its ThunderX Arm server processor roadmap and gave us the first glimpse of its second-generation ThunderX2 processors. …
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