With the oil and gas industry continuing to spend on massive supercomputers, even in the wake of declining revenues, and no sign of the HPC business slowing for the oil and gas segment, one has to wonder what alternatives on the hardware and software front these companies might look to as costs (for both systems and the power required to support them) drives skywards. …
The high ground in the server market used to be large-scale SMP and NUMA machines with 16, 32, 64, or 128 sockets all lashed together to make a big shared memory machine. …
Companies in the IT sector have a kind of inertia that is directly related to their revenue and profit streams, which are a measure of their influence in the IT supply chain and among customers. …
Hewlett-Packard may not have created a business line dedicated to custom server manufacturing like rival Dell. …
When one looks at major milestones in supercomputer history, one of the relatively recently markers rests with IBM, which began work its work to create a massively parallel system for protein folding research. …
AMD doesn’t talk much about servers these days, but it looks like the company is getting ready to revamp its server component business just as it is shutting down its SeaMicro unit. …
In the wake of today’s announcement of the codes selected to be tuned for the 2018 Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Lab, questions around how application teams are thinking about the massive amount of memory across new tiers, the swapping out of PCIe for a new interconnect, and the pervasive GPUs were first to mind. …
In the story we broke this morning about the forthcoming “Aurora” supercomputer set to be installed at Argonne National Laboratory—one of three pre-exascale machines that were part of the CORAL procurement between three national labs–we speculated that unlike the other two machines, which will be based on an OpenPower approach (Power9, Volta GPUs, and a new interconnect), the architecture of this system would be based on the third generation Knights family of chips from Intel, the Knights Hill processors. …
Update: 5:08 p.m. Eastern – We have been able to dig into more details about the system architecture and confirm Knights Hill architecture and other interconnect/system details. …
Try as it may, Ethernet cannot kill InfiniBand. For the foreseeable future, the very high-end of the server, storage, and database cluster spaces will need a network interconnect that can deliver the same or better bandwidth at lower latency than can Ethernet gear. …
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