Editor’s Choice

• Reading the Intel Tea Leaves: Pat Gelsinger’s HPC Paradox

  

  As he takes charge of Intel, CEO Pat Gelsinger faces a paradox: his new company is both troubled and a revenue geyser; if Intel is to continue its historical growth rates, he’ll need the skills of a corporate turnaround artist. These contradictions surely apply to Intel’s position in HPC/AI/data center server processors, where the company is both dominant and under siege from innovative, agile competitors cutting into the company’s 90+-percent market share. In HPC, the company is omnipresent, yet its recent failures at the upper reaches of supercomputing have been high-profile embarrassments. At the product level, the company drives innovation [READ MORE…]

• Announcing The Rich Brueckner Scholarship Awards and GoFundMe Account

  

  Rich Brueckner was one of the most influential (and beloved) figures in high performance computing. As editor-in-chief of insideHPC, he touched thousands of lives in our industry. He was a fixture at every HPC event as he walked the show floor in his trademark red hat or held court at a nearby watering hole. “Rich was a huge proponent of HPC education and a big fan of student cluster competitions,” said Dan Olds, organizer of the Winter Classic Student Cluster Competition to be held March 15, 2021,  “so we believe it is only fitting that we put together a scholarship [READ MORE…]

• Where Have You Gone, IBM?

  

  The company that built the world’s nos. 2 and 3 most powerful supercomputers is to all appearances backing away from the supercomputer systems business. IBM, whose Summit and Sierra CORAL-1 systems set the global standard for pre-exascale supercomputing, failed to win any of the three exascale contracts, and since then IBM has seemingly withdrawn from the HPC systems field. This has been widely discussed within the HPC community for at least the last 18 months. In fact, an industry analyst told us that as long ago as the annual ISC Conference in Frankfurt four years ago, he was shocked when [READ MORE…]

• DOE Under Secretary for Science Dabbar’s Exascale Update: Frontier to Be First, Aurora to Be Monitored

  

  As Exascale Day (October 18) approaches, U.S. Department of Energy Under Secretary for Science Paul Dabbar has commented on the hottest exascale question of the day: which of the country’s first three systems will be stood up first? In a recent, far-reaching interview with us, Dabbar confirmed what has been expected for more than two months, that the first U.S. exascale system will not, as planned, be the Intel-powered Aurora system at Argonne National Laboratory. It will instead be HPE-Cray’s Frontier, powered by AMD CPUs and GPUs and designated for Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

• Exascale Exasperation: Why DOE Gave Intel a 2nd Chance; Can Nvidia GPUs Ride to Aurora’s Rescue?

  

  The most talked-about topic in HPC these days – another Intel chip delay and therefore delay of the U.S.’s flagship Aurora exascale system – is something no one directly involved wants to talk about. Not Argonne National Laboratory, where Intel was to install Aurora in 2021; not the Department of Energy’s Exascale Computing Project, guiding development of a “capable exascale ecosystem”; and not DOE itself. As for Intel, a spokesperson earlier this week promised to “circle back shortly,” but hadn’t as of press time. In lieu of information (other than rote answers from public relations Q&A sheets issued three weeks [READ MORE…]