Editor’s Choice

• insideHPC and OrionX.net Launch the @HPCpodcast — episode 1

  

  insideHPC in association with the technology analyst firm OrionX.net today announced the launch of the @HPCpodcast, featuring OrionX.net analyst Shahin Khan and Doug Black, insideHPC’s editor-in-chief. @HPCpodcast is intended to be a lively and informative forum examining key technology trends driving high performance computing and artificial intelligence. Each podcast will feature Khan and Blacks’ comments on the latest HPC news and also a deeper dive into a focused topic. In our first @HPCpodcast episode, we talk about a recent spate of good news for Intel before taking up one of the hottest areas of the advanced computing arena: new HPC-AI [READ MORE…]

• How Machine Learning Is Revolutionizing HPC Simulations

  

  Physics-based simulations, that staple of traditional HPC, may be evolving toward an emerging, AI-based technique that could radically accelerate simulation runs while cutting costs. Called “surrogate machine learning models,” the topic was a focal point in a keynote on Tuesday at the International Conference on Parallel Processing by Argonne National Lab’s Rick Stevens. Stevens, ANL’s associate laboratory director for computing, environment and life sciences, said early work in “surrogates,” as the technique is called, shows tens of thousands times and more speed-ups and could “potentially replace simulations.” Surrogates can be looked at as an end-around to two big problems associated [READ MORE…]

• Double-precision CPUs vs. Single-precision GPUs; HPL vs. HPL-AI HPC Benchmarks; Traditional vs. AI Supercomputers

  

  If you’ve wondered why GPUs are faster than CPUs, in part it’s because GPUs are asked to do less – or, to be more precise, to be less precise. Next question: So if GPUs are faster than CPUs, why aren’t GPUs  the mainstream, baseline processor used in HPC server clusters? Again, in part it gets back to precision. In many workload types, particularly traditional HPC workloads, GPUs aren’t precise enough. Final question: So if GPUs and AI are inextricably linked, particularly for training machine learning models, and if GPUs are less precise than CPUs, does that mean AI is imprecise? [READ MORE…]

• The US-China Supercomputing Race, Post-Exascale HPC Government Policy and the ‘Partitioning of the Internet’

  

  All over the world, HPC has burst into geopolitics. HPC – broadly defined here as advanced supercomputing combined with big AI – is at the fault lines of national and regional rivalries, particularly between the U.S. and China, expanding in power, cost, intensity and in potential impact. Which is to say that global players put supercomputing at the heart of their defense, surveillance, healthcare and economic competitiveness strategies. Is it going too far to say that supercomputing now plays a role similar to the nuclear arms and space races in the Cold War era? Just as Sputnik spurred U.S. determination [READ MORE…]

• 6,000 GPUs: Perlmutter to Deliver 4 Exaflops, Top Spot in AI Supercomputing

  

  The U.S. National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center today unveiled the Perlmutter HPC system, a beast of a machine powered by 6,159 Nvidia A100 GPUs and delivering 4 exaflops of mixed precision performance. Perlmutter is based on the HPE Cray Shasta platform, including Slingshot interconnect, a heterogeneous system with both GPU-accelerated and CPU-only nodes. The system is being installed in two phases – today’s unveiling is Phase 1, which includes the system’s GPU-accelerated nodes and scratch file system. Phase 2 will add CPU-only nodes later in 2021. “That makes Perlmutter the fastest system on the planet on the 16- and 32-bit [READ MORE…]