In this video from the AMD booth at SC14, Phil Pokorny from Penguin Computing presents: APU Clusters and “Watts” Powering” the Future of HPC.”
Penguin Computing just announced the Altus Altus 2a30, a building block for the first application optimized accelerated processing unit (APU) clusters, making seamless GPU and CPU memory sharing on clusters a reality based on heterogeneous system architecture (HSA) from AMD. The shared memory capability involves very lightweight context switches to switch instantaneously between the GPU and CPU, whichever code runs best at a given moment. Today’s applications require power efficiency and high performance achieved through highly parallel computing, however GPUs and CPUs present a bottleneck to efficient cluster functionality due to separate memory space. This traditional architecture results in inefficient GPU/CPU communication, which is a challenge to scaling.
We are making these machines immediately available for evaluation as a tremendous tool for software development,” said Phil Pokorny, Chief Technology Officer, Penguin Computing. “HSA is a reality and our technology is already in the hands of major U.S. labs. Penguin Computing’s extensive experience in APU cluster development and implementation is instrumental in this progress, in addition to close collaborate with AMD.”
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