Sponsored Article

The Evolution, Convergence and Cooling of AI & HPC Gear
Nov. 7, 2024

Years ago, when Artificial Intelligence (AI) began to emerge as a potential technology to be harnessed as a powerful tool to change the way the world works, organizations began to kick the AI tires by exploring it’s potential to enhance their research or business. However, to get started with AI, neural networks needed to be created, data sets trained, and microprocessors were needed that could perform matrix-multiplication calculations ideally suited to perform these computationally demanding tasks. Enter the accelerator.


A Look Back: Lenovo @ ISC24
June 3, 2024

Hamburg, Germany was the perfect backdrop for this year’s International Supercomputing Conference (ISC24) with beautiful weather and a bustling event at Congress Center Hamburg. Near the middle of the showroom floor stood Lenovo’s eye-catching booth featuring the recently announced Lenovo ThinkSystem SR780a V3 taking center stage along with demos outlining the booth showcasing how Lenovo is Transforming HPC & AI for All.


News Feed

The Back End AI Network Puts Pressure On The Front End

For most of the history of high performance computing, a supercomputer was a freestanding, isolated machine that was designed to run some simulation or model and the only link it needed to the outside world was a relatively small one to show some visualization.

The Back End AI Network Puts Pressure On The Front End was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

@HPCpodcast: MLCommons’ David Kanter on AI Benchmarks and What They’re Telling Us

Special guest David Kanter of ML Commons joins us to discuss the critical importance AI performance metrics. In addition to the well-known MLPerf benchmark for AI training, ML Commons provides a growing suite of benchmarks and data sets for other aspects of AI, such as inference, storage and safety. In this episode sponsored by Lenovo, David talks about how MLCommons manages the expansion of its benchmark portfolio, the growth of its membership community, how to interpret its benchmarks, and he shares insights on what the benchmarks results, in their totality, are telling us.

The post @HPCpodcast: MLCommons’ David Kanter on AI Benchmarks and What They’re Telling Us appeared first on High-Performance Computing News Analysis | insideHPC.

Biden Administration ‘Races’ to Allocate CHIPS Act Funds

With the election over and potential threats to the CHIPS Act coming from victorious Republicans, the White Houe is reportedly racing "to get CHIPS Act money out the door” before the Biden presidency ends in January ....

The post Biden Administration ‘Races’ to Allocate CHIPS Act Funds appeared first on High-Performance Computing News Analysis | insideHPC.

Cisco Puts Big AI Infrastructure Into Small Packages

Generative AI is still very much an emerging technology and it’s morphing and evolving rapidly, as is illustrated with the trend toward agentic AI, which we’ve written about previously.

Cisco Puts Big AI Infrastructure Into Small Packages was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.

TOP500 News

The Evolution, Convergence and Cooling of AI & HPC Gear
Nov. 7, 2024

Years ago, when Artificial Intelligence (AI) began to emerge as a potential technology to be harnessed as a powerful tool to change the way the world works, organizations began to kick the AI tires by exploring it’s potential to enhance their research or business. However, to get started with AI, neural networks needed to be created, data sets trained, and microprocessors were needed that could perform matrix-multiplication calculations ideally suited to perform these computationally demanding tasks. Enter the accelerator.


A Look Back: Lenovo @ ISC24
June 3, 2024

Hamburg, Germany was the perfect backdrop for this year’s International Supercomputing Conference (ISC24) with beautiful weather and a bustling event at Congress Center Hamburg. Near the middle of the showroom floor stood Lenovo’s eye-catching booth featuring the recently announced Lenovo ThinkSystem SR780a V3 taking center stage along with demos outlining the booth showcasing how Lenovo is Transforming HPC & AI for All.



The List

06/2024 Highlights

The 63rd edition of the TOP500 reveals that Frontier has once again claimed the top spot, despite no longer being the only exascale machine on the list. Additionally, a new system has found its way into the Top 10.

The Frontier system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, USA remains the most powerful system on the list with an HPL score of 1.206 EFlop/s. The system has a total of 8,699,904 combined CPU and GPU cores, an HPE Cray EX architecture that combines 3rd Gen AMD EPYC CPUs optimized for HPC and AI with AMD Instinct MI250X accelerators, and it relies on Cray’s Slingshot 11 network for data transfer. On top of that, this machine has an impressive power efficiency rating of 52.59 GFlops/Watt – putting Frontier at the No. 11 spot on the GREEN500.

Also like the last list, the Aurora system at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility in Illinois, USA, has claimed the No. 2 spot on the TOP500. Despite currently being commissioned and not fully complete, Aurora is now the second machine to officially break the exascale barrier with an HPL score of 1.012 EFlop/s – an improvement over the 585.34 PFlop/s score from the last list. This system is based on HPE Cray EX- Intel Exascale Computer Blade and uses Intel Xeon CPU Max series processors, Intel Data Center GPU Max Series accelerators, and a Slingshot-11 interconnect.

The Eagle system installed on the Microsoft Azure Cloud in the USA reclaimed the No. 3 spot that it achieved after its debut appearance on the previous list, and it remains the highest-ranking cloud system on the TOP500. This Microsoft NDv5 system has an HPL score of 561.2 PFlop/s and is based on Intel Xeon Platinum 8480C processors and NVIDIA H100 accelerators.

Fugaku also retained its No. 4 spot from the previous list, despite holding the No.1 spot from June 2020 until November 2021. Based in Kobe, Japan, Fugaku has an HPL score of 442 PFlop/s and it remains the highest-ranked system outside the USA. The LUMI system at EuroHPC/CSC in Finland also remained in its spot at No. 5 with an HPL score of 380 PFlop/s. This machine is the largest system in Europe.

The only new system to find its way onto the Top 10 is the Alps machine at No. 6 from the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) in Switzerland. This system achieved an HPL score of 270 PFlop/s.

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