Editor’s Choice

• 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…]

• IBM Doubles Down on 1000+-Qubit Quantum in 2023

  

  As expectation-setting goes in the technology industry, this is bold. At IBM’s annual Think conference, a senior systems executive reiterated the company’s intent to deliver a 1,121-qubit IBM Quantum Condor processor by 2023. In a video interview with theCUBE, technology publication SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, IBM GM of systems strategy and development for enterprise security, Jamie Thomas, said the company is on track with its quantum roadmap – though she did not sugarcoat the challenges involved. “In terms of the roadmap around hardware, we put ourselves out there,” said Thomas. “We said we were going to get to over a [READ MORE…]

• Report: Security Firm Says HPC Clusters under Attack: ‘Level of Sophistication Rarely Seen in Linux Malware’

  

  This is an updated version of a story first publised on Feb. 1. UK technology industry publication PCR published a story today stating that an international data security firm, ESET, has reported the identification of a malware called Kobalos that targets supercomputing clusters. They also said they have been working with security experts at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research and other organizations on stemming attacks. “Among other targets was a large Asian ISP, a North American endpoint security vendor as well as several privately held servers,” PCR reported.

• 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…]