Google today introduced the Accelerator-Optimized VM (A2) instance family on Google Compute Engine based on the NVIDIA Ampere A100 Tensor Core GPU, launched in mid-May. Available in alpha and with up to 16 GPUs, A2 VMs are the first A100-based offering in a public cloud, according to Google. At its launch, Nvidia said the A100, built on the company’s new Ampere architecture, delivers “the greatest generational leap ever,” according to Nvidia, enhancing training and inference computing performance by 20x over its predecessors.
Google Unveils 1st Public Cloud VMs using Nvidia Ampere A100 Tensor GPUs
July 7, 2020 by Leave a Comment
Reports: TSMC May Commercialize Production of Cerebras-style AI Supercomputing Chips
July 6, 2020 by Leave a Comment
Published reports state that TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company) may begin commercial production within two years of specialized supercomputer AI chips, an outgrowth of the company’s customized fabrication of the Wafer Scale Engine (WSE) developed by AI start-up Cerebras Systems. Last August, Cerebras unveiled the WSE (price: US$2 million), which it said is the largest […]
The Hyperion-insideHPC Interviews: Rich Brueckner and Doug Ball Talk CFD, Autonomous Mobility and Driving Down HPC Package Sizing
July 3, 2020 by Leave a Comment
Doug Ball is a leading expert in computational fluid dynamics and aerodynamic engineering, disciplines he became involved with more than 40 years ago. In this interview with the late Rich Brueckner of insideHPC, Ball discusses the increased scale and model complexity that HPC technology has come to handle and, looking to the future, his anticipation […]
RadioFreeHPC Podcast: NSF, QIS Funding, But First…
July 3, 2020 by Leave a Comment
….we discuss some recent government news. First is that the US House is looking to devote an additional $1.25 billion over the next five years. But even bigger is the proposal to expand the US National Science Foundation by $100 beeelion – which is more than 4x the size of the existing organization. We discuss the implications of this and how this might change the game in terms of base research. There is also a bill to significantly dial up funding for Quantum Information Science. All good and the team s excited to see these moves and hopes they’ll proceed swimmingly!
Reinventing HPC Architectures with In-Package Optical I/O
July 2, 2020 by Leave a Comment
In this sponsored post, our friends over at Ayar Labs indicate that although the industry has long recognized the potential of optical I/O as a solution for many HPC challenges, it is only in recent years that economic in-package optical solutions have become available. At last, optical I/O has emerged as the best solution to drive the next phase of Moore’s Law-like advances in post-exascale systems performance. In part this is because there have not been game-changing breakthroughs in the materials used in traditional interconnects.
insideHPC Special Report: Citizens Benefit from Public/Private Partnerships – Part 3
June 29, 2020 by Leave a Comment
This special report sponsored by Dell Technologies, takes a look at how now more than ever, agencies from all levels of government are teaming with private Information Technology (IT) organizations to leverage AI and HPC to create and implement solutions that not only increase safety for all, but also provide a more streamlined and modern experience for citizens.
PRACE Awards Hundreds of Millions More Core Hours to Combat COVID-19
June 17, 2020 by Leave a Comment
PRACE, the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, has issued an additional 10 awards of supercomputing resources, with a total of 227.6 million core hours for the European Union’s effort to combat COVID-19. This follows the first 10 awards recently announced by the organization. Here’s a summary of the latest PRACE awards….
AWS: GA of Arm-based Instances Boost Price/Performance 40% for HPC, Inferencing Workloads
June 11, 2020 by Leave a Comment
Launched last December, Amazon Web Services today announced general availability of its sixth generation of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances, with three new instances powered by AWS-designed, Arm-based Graviton2 processors, that the company said delivers 40 percent better price/performance over current x86-based instances.
Interview: Mark Papermaster, CTO and EVP, Technology and Engineering, AMD
June 3, 2020 by 1 Comment
In this interview, Mark Papermaster, CTO and EVP, Technology and Engineering from AMD describes the company’s presence in the HPC space along with new trends in the industry. At a higher level, Mark also offers his views of the semiconductor industry in general as well as areas of innovation that AMD plans to cultivate. The discussion then turns to the exascale era of computing.
HDR 200Gb/s InfiniBand: The Key to Success for Supercomputers Around the World
June 2, 2020 by Leave a Comment
HDR 200Gb/s InfiniBand delivers the interconnect industry’s highest data throughput, extremely low latency and world-leading performance to HPC systems across the globe. With a foundation based on HDR 200Gb/s InfiniBand, high-performance systems are changing the way we understand the world we live in through scientific discoveries, environmental research, advanced medical research and realizing the potential for innovation in countless areas of business that are sure to drive change within the social and global landscape of tomorrow.
