NVIDIA Receives Approval to Proceed with Mellanox Acquisition

Today NVIDIA announced that it has received approval from all necessary authorities to proceed with its planned acquisition of Mellanox, as announced in March 2019. “This exciting transaction would unite two HPC industry leaders and strengthen the combined company’s ability to create data-centric system architectures for the convergence of the HPC and hyperscale markets around AI and other HPDA tasks,” said Steve Conway from Hyperion Research.

Timelapse Video: Sawtooth Supercomputer Assembly

In this video, technicians install the Sawtooth supercomputer at Idaho National Laboratory. “Named after a central Idaho mountain range, Sawtooth arrived in December and will be available to users soon. The $19.2 million system ranks #37 on the 2019 Top500 fastest supercomputers in the world. That is the highest ranking reached by an INL supercomputer. Of 102 new systems added to the list in the past six months, only three were faster than Sawtooth.”

Mellanox to Acquire Titan IC for Security and Data Analytics

Today Mellanox announced that it has reached a definitive agreement to acquire privately held Titan IC, the leading developer of network intelligence (NI) and security technology to accelerate search and big data analytics across a broad range of applications in data centers worldwide. The acquisition will further strengthen Mellanox’s network intelligence capabilities delivered through the […]

GPCNeT or GPCNoT?

In this special guest feature, Gilad Shainer from Mellanox Technologies writes that the new GPCNeT benchmark is actually a measure of relative performance under load rather than a measure of absolute performance. “When it comes to evaluating high-performance computing systems or interconnects, there are much better benchmarks available for use. Moreover, the ability to benchmark real workloads is obviously a better approach for determining system or interconnect performance and capabilities. The drawbacks of GPCNeT benchmarks can be much more than its benefits.”

HLRS Inaugurates Hawk Supercomputer from HPE

HLRS officially dedicated their new Hawk supercomputer computer this week at a ceremony in Stuttgart, Germany. With a peak performance of approximately 26 Petaflops, Hawk is an HPE Apollo 9000 System and is among the fastest supercomputers worldwide and the fastest general purpose system for scientific and industrial computing in Europe. “Computers like Hawk are tools for advanced research in the sciences and in industry,” said Parliamentary State Secretary Dr. Michael Meister. “They enable excellent science and innovation, and solidify Germany’s international position as a top location for supercomputing.”

Predictions for HPC in 2020

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.”

Video: Overview of HPC Interconnects

Ken Raffenetti from Argonne gave this talk at ATPESC 2019. “The Argonne Training Program on Extreme-Scale Computing (ATPESC) provides intensive, two-week training on the key skills, approaches, and tools to design, implement, and execute computational science and engineering applications on current high-end computing systems and the leadership-class computing systems of the future.”

UMass Dartmouth Speeds Research with Hybrid Supercomputer from Microway

UMass Dartmouth’s powerful new cluster from Microway affords the university five times the compute performance its researchers enjoyed previously, with over 85% more total memory and over four times the aggregate memory bandwidth. “The UMass Dartmouth cluster reflects a hybrid design to appeal to a wide array of the campus’ workloads. “Over 50 nodes include Intel Xeon Scalable Processors, DDR4 memory, SSDs and Mellanox ConnectX-5 EDR 100Gb InfiniBand. A subset of systems also feature NVIDIA V100 GPU accelerators. Equally important are a second subset of POWER9 with 2nd Generation NVLink- based- IBM Power Systems AC922 Compute nodes.”

OpenStack Adds Native Upstream Support for HDR InfiniBand

Today Mellanox announced that OpenStack software now includes native and upstream support for virtualization over HDR 200 gigabit InfiniBand network, enabling customers to build high-performance OpenStack-based cloud services over the most enhanced interconnect infrastructure, taking advantage of InfiniBand’s extremely low latency, high data-throughput, In-Network Computing and more.

HDR 200GB/sec InfiniBand for HPC & AI

In this video from the DDN booth at SC19, Scot Schultz from Mellanox presents: Connecting Visions: HDR 200GB/sec InfiniBand. “HDR 200Gb/s InfiniBand accelerates 31 percent of new InfiniBand-based systems on the current TOP500, including the fastest TOP500 supercomputer built this year. The results also highlight InfiniBand’s continued position in the top three supercomputers in the world and acceleration of six of the top 10 systems. Since the TOP500 List release in June 2019, InfiniBand’s presence has increased by 12 percent, now accelerating 141 supercomputers on the List.”