In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team reviews the results of the ASC19 Student Cluster Competition and HPC workshop in China. “For the first time, a non-mainland-Chinese team wins the top spot. Taiwan takes the gold in part by their stellar performance in HPCG benchmark where they achieved 2 TFlops, some 25% better than the 2nd best team. The system was a 5-node cluster with Infiniband FDR interconnect.”
Radio Free HPC Ponders Amdahl’s Law, GPUs, and the ASC19 Student Cluster Competition
June 3, 2019 by
Jack Dongarra Named a Foreign Fellow of the Royal Society
April 17, 2019 by
Jack Dongarra from the University of Tennessee has been named a Foreign Fellow of the Royal Society, joining previously inducted icons of science such as Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, and Stephen Hawking. “This honor is both humbling because of others who have been so recognized and gratifying for the acknowledgement of the research and work I have done,” Dongarra said. “I’m deeply grateful for this recognition.”
Registration Opens for ISC 2019 in Frankfurt
April 3, 2019 by
Early registration is now open for ISC High Performance, the largest high performance computing forum in Europe. The event takes place June 16 – 20 in Frankfurt, Germany. “ISC High Performance is recognized internationally for its strength in bringing together different academic and commercial disciplines to share knowledge in the field of high performance computing. With our first event dating back over 30 years, we’ve created a community spanning the globe. Over that period we have welcomed attendees from over 80 countries, which has made ISC a highly diverse event.”
Video: Arm in HPC
March 15, 2019 by
Brent Gorda from ARM gave this talk at the Rice Oil & Gas Conference. “With the recent Astra system at Sandia Lab (#203 on the Top500) and HPE Catalyst project in the UK, Arm-based architectures are arriving in HPC environments. Several partners have announced or will soon announce new silicon and projects, each of which offers something different and compelling for our community. Brent will describe the driving factors and how these solutions are changing the landscape for HPC.”
NVIDIA to Purchase Mellanox for $6.9 Billion
March 11, 2019 by
Today NVIDIA announced plans to acquire Mellanox for approximately $6.9 billion. The acquisition will unite two of the world’s leading companies in HPC. Together, NVIDIA’s computing platform and Mellanox’s interconnects power over 250 of the world’s TOP500 supercomputers and have as customers every major cloud service provider and computer maker.
Michael Feldman Joins The Next Platform as Senior Editor
January 7, 2019 by
Veteran HPC journalist Michael Feldman has departed TOP500.org to join The Next Platform as Senior Editor. Led by co-founders Nicole Hemsoth and Timothy Prickett Morgan, offers in-depth coverage of high-end computing at large enterprises, supercomputing centers, hyperscale data centers, and public clouds. “My new role also reunites me with some old friends, who just happen to be some of the best writers in the business,” says Feldman. “Not surprisingly, my focus will be on HPC and all things related. These days, that covers a lot of territory since in many ways HPC has provided a useful model for other subject matter that is under the purview of The Next Platform, namely hyperscale, cloud, and high-end enterprise computing.”
Why InfiniBand rules the roost in the TOP500
December 29, 2018 by
In this special guest feature, Bill Lee from the InfiniBand Trade Association writes that the new TOP500 list has a lot to say about how interconnects matter for the world’s most powerful supercomputers. “Once again, the List highlights that InfiniBand is the top choice for the most powerful and advanced supercomputers in the world, including the reigning #1 system – Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s (ORNL) Summit. The TOP500 List results not only report that InfiniBand accelerates the top three supercomputers in the world but is also the most used high-speed interconnect for the TOP500 systems.”
Radio Free HPC Looks at TOP500 Trends on the Road to Exascale
November 26, 2018 by
In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the semi-annual TOP500 BoF presentation by Jack Dongarra.
The TOP500 list of supercomputers serves as a “Who’s Who” in the field of High Performance Computing. “This BoF will present detailed analyses of the TOP500 and discuss the changes in the HPC marketplace during the past years. The BoF is meant as an open forum for discussion and feedback between the TOP500 authors and the user community.”
Overclocked NVIDIA DGX-2H Cluster Lands at #61 on the TOP500
November 19, 2018 by
In this video from SC18 in Dallas, Marc Hamilton from NVIDIA describe the all new overclocked DGX-2H supercomputer. Built by NVIDIA, a cluster of 36 DGX-2H devices with 3 Petaflops of LINPACK performance was just ranked #62 on the TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers.
The Green HPCG List and the Road to Exascale
November 19, 2018 by
In this special guest post, Axel Huebl looks at the TOP500 and HPCG with an eye on power efficiency trends to watch on the road to Exascale. “This post will focus one efficiency, in terms of performance per Watt, simply because system power envelope is a major constrain for upcoming Exascale systems. With the great numbers from TOP500, we try to extend theoretical estimates from theoretical Flop/Ws of individual compute hardware to system scale.”
