Report: China ‘Seizing’ HPC High Ground, Plans 10 Exascale Systems by 2025
Exascale supercomputing – which systems vendors can deliver it, which supercomputing centers can access it, which countries have it – will no doubt be a hot topic at the ISC 2022 conference in Germany later this month and in government policy circles concerned with HPC’s geopolitical impact. The discussion is only heating up with a new article in the Financial Times reporting on China’s apparent 12-month-plus exascale lead over the US, Japan and Europe along with China’s plan to have 10 exascale systems in place by 2025. While most of the article in the FT restates much that’s already been [READ MORE…]
Featured Stories
Intel Puts $700M into Hillsboro Liquid Cooling, Sustainability R&D ‘Mega Lab’
Intel announced a $700 million “mega lab” at its Jones Farm campus in Hillsboro, OR, to be used for R&D in liquid cooling and other sustainability technologies with implications for power-insatiable HPC data centers. The company said it plans to build a 200,000-square-foot, facility “focused on innovative data center technologies and addressing areas such as heating, cooling and water usage” – and heat recapture and reuse. Additionally, Intel introduced what [READ MORE…]
@HPCpodcast: Google Cloud’s 9 Exaflop AI Supercomputer, Chip Price Hikes, HPC Helps Photograph a Black Hole in Our Galaxy and IBM’s Quantum Ambitions
@HPCpodcast was so pleased with our last episode, an extensive interview with the University of Tennessee’s (and Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s) Jack Dongarra (our followers liked it too), that we decided to let that episode stand as a special, double podcast edition podcast. Now Shahin and Doug are back behind our mics talking about a raft of interesting news in the HPC/AI world, including what Google Cloud bills as the [READ MORE…]
TSMC, Samsung to Hike Chip Prices
The HPC sector – in which systems utilize hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of chips – is chip-price sensitive. Now comes news that two of the world’s most advanced chip manufacturers, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and Samsung, are warning customers they plan to raise prices significantly. Due to global inflation, rising electricity and component costs, higher interest rates, supply chain woes and geopolitical instability (war in Ukraine, Covid [READ MORE…]
Sponsored by: Silicon MechanicsSystem Design Decisions to Achieve Faster Results in Drug Discovery
When it comes to drug discovery, research is everything. The ability to accelerate research can make or break a business and, of course, save lives. However, key design considerations in HPC infrastructure design can make a dramatic difference in performance and maximize your cluster’s value. How do you maximize HPC/AI performance? We recommend you start by using commodity off the shelf (COTS) components and best-of-breed technologies from trusted partners. This Sponsored by: Silicon MechanicsSystem Design Decisions to Achieve Faster Results in Drug Discovery”>[READ MORE…]
Featured Resource

Sponsored by: PanasasIs Your Storage Infrastructure Ready for the Coming AI Wave?
In this new whitepaper from our friends over at Panasas, we take a look at whether your storage infrastructure is ready for the robust requirements in support of AI workloads. AI promises to not only create entirely new industries, but it will also fundamentally change the way organizations large and small conduct business. IT planners need to start revising their storage infrastructure now to prepare the organization for the coming AI wave.
HPC Newsline
- GIGABYTE Releases Arm-Based Server for NVIDIA Baseboard Accelerators for HPC, AI
- AMD to Use AMD EPYC-Powered Google Cloud’s C2D VM Instance for EDA
- Report: China ‘Seizing’ HPC High Ground, Plans 10 Exascale Systems by 2025
- Amazon Web Services Joins Q-NEXT Quantum Research Center
- Sylabs Readies for Native OCI Compatibility with Release of SingularityCE 3.10
- NEC Selects DDN and Nvidia for AI Research Supercomputer in Japan
- Wellspring Receives FedRAMP Authorization for IP Management Platform
- HPE to Build HPC and AI Systems Factory in Czech Republic
- Exascale Computing Project’s Doug Kothe to Be Named Oak Ridge Associate Lab Director
- EV Company REE Announces Progress Toward Commercial Robotic Production Capabilities
- Classiq Announces Investment from HSBC, NTT Finance, Neva SGR (Intesa Sanpaolo Group)
- DOE CSGF Names 33 Graduate Fellows
- Argonne to Host ‘Future of Computing’ May 18
- WEKA’s Zvibel on Streamlining the Data Pipeline that Fuels AI/ML
- Women in HPC Returns in Support of Greater Equity at ISC 2022 in Hamburg
- Argonne’s Globus Software Wins Award at 2021 Data Mover Challenge
- Google Cloud Says TPU-Powered Machine Learning Cluster Delivers 9 Exaflops Aggregate Power
- IBM to Deliver Software as-a-Service on AWS
- Arm Reports Record Revenues and Profits in FY21
- Atos Talks European HPC Openness and a Hybrid Future of AI, Machine Learning and Quantum Supercomputing
- IBM Quantum Promises 4,000-Qubit Processor in 2025, Envisions ‘Quantum-Centric Supercomputing’
- Classiq Announces $25K Quantum Circuits Challenge
- Tesla: Cooling Tech Engineer Stole Dojo Exascale Supercomputer Secrets
- Open Compute Project Global Summit Issues Call for Papers
- Exascale Computing Project BoF Days May 10-12
- General Dynamics IT Unit Wins $89.5M EPA HPC Contract
- @HPCpodcast: Jack Dongarra Talks Turing Award, the TOP500 and the Past and Future of Supercomputing
- Hyperion Research Announces Special June HPC User Forum: Exascale at Oak Ridge
- Nominations Open for SC 2025 General Chair and Steering Committee Openings
- Post-Exascale Fabric: NNSA Awards Cornelis Networks $18M for High Performance Network R&D
Industry Perspectives
HPC: Stop Scaling the Hard Way
…today’s situation is clear: HPC is struggling with reliability at scale. Well over 10 years ago, Google proved that commodity hardware was both cheaper and more effective for hyperscale processing when controlled by software-defined systems, yet the HPC market persists with its old-school, hardware-based paradigm. Perhaps this is due to prevailing industry momentum or working within the collective comfort zone of established practices. Either way, hardware-centric approaches to storage resiliency need to go.
New, Open DPC++ Extensions Complement SYCL and C++
In this guest article, our friends at Intel discuss how accelerated computing has diversified over the past several years given advances in CPU, GPU, FPGA, and AI technologies. This innovation drives the need for an open and cross-platform language that allows developers to realize the potential of new hardware, minimizes development cost and complexity, and maximizes reuse of their software investments.
Featured from insideBIGDATA
- The Next Data Revolution is Here – AI Will Understand What Isn’t Being SaidIn this special guest feature, Ran Margaliot, COO and VP R&D for Affogata, discusses how nalyzing and sorting through unstructured data saves countless hours and recognizes patterns in seconds that even skilled data professionals may never uncover. That data “superpower” can lead to better products that adapt in real-time, responsive customer service, and a sharing of insights across an organization magnifies […]
News from insideBIGDATA
- “Above the Trend Line” – Your Industry Rumor Central for 5/20/2022
- Heard on the Street – 5/19/2022
- The Next Data Revolution is Here – AI Will Understand What Isn’t Being Said
- UiPath Partners with Adobe to Automate End-to-End Digital Document Processes and Workflows
- Emza and Alif Demonstrate Fast, Ultra-Efficient Object Detection for Tiny AI Edge Devices
- Next-Generation of Tableau Brings Advanced Analytics and Automated Insights to Business Users
- Predictions for the Future of Low-Code Automation
Editor’s Choice
Chip Geopolitics: If China Invades, Make Taiwan ‘Unwantable’ by Destroying TSMC, Military Paper Suggests
US military planners are taking notice of a suggestion by two military scholars calling for the destruction of semiconductor foundry company Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSMC), whose fabs produce advanced microprocessors used in HPC and AI, in the event China invades the island nation A news story in today’ edition of Data Center Times cites the Nikkei Asia news service and a paper in the U.S. Army War College’s scholarly journal, Parameters, discussing the possibility of Taiwan adopting “’a scorched earth policy’ and wipe out its own semiconductor foundries in the wake of any Chinese invasion as a deterrent, U.S. [READ MORE…]
Exascale: Rumors Circulate HPC Community Regarding Frontier’s Status
By now you may have expected a triumphant announcement from the U.S. Department of Energy that the Frontier supercomputer, slated to be installed by the end of 2021 as the first U.S. exascale-class system, has been stood up with all systems go. But as of now, DOE (whose Oak Ridge National Laboratory will house Frontier) is foregoing a “mission accomplished” announcement and instead has issued a somewhat formal statement about Frontier’s status. Left unaddressed are rumors circulating through the HPC community of difficulties encountered in the late stages of Frontier system integration and fine tuning. Here’s the official statement on [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 of times (and more) speed-ups and could “potentially replace simulations.” Surrogates can be looked at as an end-around to two big problems [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…]
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…]