Google Compute Engine offers VMs with 96 Skylake CPUs and 624GB of Memory

Google Compute Engine now offers new VMs with the most Skylake vCPUs of any cloud provider. “Skylake in turn provides up to 20% faster compute performance, 82% faster HPC performance, and almost 2X the memory bandwidth compared with the previous generation Xeon. Need even more compute power or memory? We’re also working on a range of new, even larger VMs, with up to 4TB of memory.”

Podcast: 18 Petaflop Stampede 2 Supercomputer Powers Research at TACC

In this Texas Standard podcast, Dan Stanzione from TACC describes Stampede2, the most powerful university supercomputer in the United States. “Phase 1 of the Stampede2 rollout, now complete, features 4,200 Knights Landing (KNL) nodes, the second generation of processors based on Intel’s Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture. Later this summer Phase 2 will add 1,736 Intel Xeon Skylake nodes.”

Liquid Cooling for HPC Gains Momentum with Asetek at ISC 2017

“Liquid cooling is becoming the new norm in the face of skyrocketing wattages by CPUs, GPUs and cluster nodes. Asetek cooling solutions are currently provided by OEMs such as Cray, Fujitsu, Format, Penguin. Liquid cooling for NVIDIA P100, Intel Knight’s Landing and Skylake were all on display at Asetek’s booth as well as rack-level options such as InRackCDU and Vertical RackCDU.”

Intel Skylake Comes to Google Cloud Platform

Today the Google Cloud Platform announced that it is the first cloud provider to offer the next generation Intel Xeon processor, codenamed Skylake. “Skylake includes Intel Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX-512), which make it ideal for scientific modeling, genomic research, 3D rendering, data analytics and engineering simulations. When compared to previous generations, Skylake’s AVX-512 doubles the floating-point performance for the heaviest calculations. In our own internal tests, it improved application performance by up to 30%.”