This video from Coreteks provides an overview of the Fujitsu A64FX processor that will power the pending Fugaku supercomputer in Japan. “The A64FX is a many core CPU like AMD Epyc or Intel’s Xeons, but at the same time it behaves like a GPU in some workloads matching NVIDIA’s most powerful offering, Volta. Today we’ll look at how this chip operates, why it could challenge Intel, AMD, NVIDIA and cloud and hyperscalers and what it could mean for us PC enthusiasts.”
Video: Ampere Altra is Industry’s First 80-Core Server Processor
March 4, 2020 by Leave a Comment
Today Ampere announced that it has begun shipping the Ampere Altra processor, the industry’s first 80-core server CPU and the first cloud native CPU for modern cloud and edge computing data centers. Ampere Altra is the company’s next generation cloud-focused product, and first in a new class of CPUs rolling out on an annual basis from Ampere’s roadmap, that will provide predictable high performance, secure isolation through single-threaded cores, scalability across the entire platform, and new levels of power efficiency.
Isambard 2 at UK Met Office to be largest Arm supercomputer in Europe
February 17, 2020 by Leave a Comment
The UK Met Office been awarded £4.1m by EPSRC to create Isambard 2, the largest Arm-based supercomputer in Europe. The powerful new £6.5m facility, to be hosted by the Met Office in Exeter and utilized by the universities of Bath, Bristol, Cardiff and Exeter, will double the size of GW4 Isambard, to 21,504 high performance cores and 336 nodes. “Isambard 2 will incorporate the latest novel technologies from HPE and new partner Fujitsu, including next-generation Arm CPUs in one of the world’s first A64fx machines from Cray.”
Predictions for HPC in 2020
February 17, 2020 by Leave a Comment
In this special guest feature from Scientific Computing World, Laurence Horrocks-Barlow from OCF predicts that containerization, cloud, and GPU-based workloads are all going to dominate the HPC environment in 2020. “Over the last year, we’ve seen a strong shift towards the use of cloud in HPC, particularly in the case of storage. Many research institutions are working towards a ‘cloud first’ policy, looking for cost savings in using the cloud rather than expanding their data centres with overheads, such as cooling, data and cluster management and certification requirements.”
Arm HPC User Group to Host First Annual Meeting in Portugal
February 5, 2020 by
Arm’s HPC User Group (A-HUG) is transitioning to a fully-fledged community-led organization to better support the Arm ecosystem. The first annual meeting of the community-lead A-HUG will be held March 12-13 in Porto, Portugal. “The A-HUG event will include a hands-on training event and excellent talks covering the broad landscape of early systems & experience, near-term expectations for new hardware, and long term trends for architectures.”
Fujitsu to Deploy Arm-based Supercomputer at Nagoya University
February 4, 2020 by
Today Fujitsu announced that it has received an order for an Arm-based supercomputer system from Nagoya University’s Information Technology Center. “For the first time in the world, this system will adopt 2,304 nodes of the Fujitsu Supercomputer PRIMEHPC FX1000, which utilizes the technology of the supercomputer Fugaku developed jointly with RIKEN. The sum of the theoretical computational performance of the entire system is 15.88 petaflops, making it one of the highest performing systems in Japan.”
NVIDIA and Arm look to accelerate HPC Worldwide
January 21, 2020 by
In this video, NVIDIA’s Duncan Poole and Arm’s David Lecomber explain how the two company’s accelerate the world’s fastest supercomputers. “At SC19, NVIDIA introduced a reference design platform that enables companies to quickly build GPU-accelerated Arm-based servers, driving a new era of high performance computing for a growing range of applications in science and industry. The reference design platform — consisting of hardware and software building blocks — responds to growing demand in the HPC community to harness a broader range of CPU architectures.”
ORNL Tests Arm-based Wombat Platform with NVIDIA GPUs
January 19, 2020 by
Researchers at ORNL are trying out their HPC codes on Wombat, a test bed cluster based on production Marvell ThunderX2 CPUs and NVIDIA V100 GPUs. The small cluster provides a platform for testing NVIDIA’s new CUDA software stack purpose-built for Arm CPU systems. “Eight teams successfully ported their codes to the new system in the days leading up to SC19. In less than 2 weeks, eight codes in a variety of scientific domains were running smoothly on Wombat.”
Full Roundup: SC19 Booth Tour Videos from insideHPC
January 8, 2020 by
Now that SC19 is behind us, it’s time to gather our booth tour videos in one place. Throughout the course of the show, insideHPC talked to dozens of HPC innovators showcasing the very latest in hardware, software, and cooling technologies.
Joe Landman on How the Cloud is Changing HPC
January 6, 2020 by
In this special guest feature, Joe Landman from Scalability.org writes that the move to cloud-based HPC is having some unexpected effects on the industry. “When you purchase a cloud HPC product, you can achieve productivity in time scales measurable in hours to days, where previously weeks to months was common. It cannot be overstated how important this is.”
