Updated: There is some chatter – some might call it well-informed speculation – going on out there on the Intertubes that Japanese system maker NEC is shutting down its “Aurora” Vector Engine vector processor business. …
Whenever a process shrink is available to chip designers, there are several different levers they can pull to make a more powerful compute engine. …
Sponsored When it comes to compute engines and network interconnects for supercomputers, there are lots of different choices available, but ultimately the nature of the applications — and how they evolve over time — will drive the technology choices that organizations make. …
The era of vector supercomputing might sound like ancient history to some but it’s still deeply rooted in major commercial and government institutions. …
There are two different Auroras right now in supercomputing. There is the shape-shifting, legendary, and maybe even mythical “Aurora” and now “Aurora A21” exascale supercomputer that was being built by Intel with “Knights” many core processors and now, if Intel can get them out the door, with a combination of “Sapphire Rapids” Xeon SP processors and “Ponte Vecchio” Xe GPU accelerators, for Argonne National Laboratory. …
For those who have followed the evolution of supercomputing over the years, the Earth Simulator series of systems has represented the state of the art in workload-oriented design. …
Ever since the “Aurora” vector processor designed by NEC was launched last year, we have been wondering if it might be used as a tool to accelerate workloads other than the traditional HPC simulation and modeling jobs that are based on crunching numbers in single and double precision floating point. …
We caught wind of the “Aurora” Vector Engine vector processor and the “Tsubasa” system from NEC that makes use of it ahead of the SC17 supercomputer conference, and revealed everything we could find out about the system and speculated a bit about how the underlying processor in the absence of real data. …
Seymour Cray loved vector supercomputers, and made the second part of that term a household word because of it. …
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