In March, ministers from seven of the largest European countries signed a declaration that established a timeline for fielding two exascale supercomputers in 2022. The agreement also specified that at least one of these systems will be based on European technology, although, as it turns out, not everyone seems to think this is the best way forward.

AMD is looking to penetrate the deep learning market with a new line of Radeon GPU cards optimized for processing neural networks, along with a suite of open source software meant to offer an alternative to NVIDIAs more proprietary CUDA ecosystem.

Even though there wasnt much turnover in the latest TOP500 list, a number of new petascale supercomputers appeared that reflect a number of interesting trends in the way HPC architectures are evolving. For the purposes of this discussion, well focus on three of these new systems: Stampede2, TSUBAME 3.0, and MareNostrum 4.

There are many people whose primary role is running HPC centres, fighting for funding, architecting and delivering HPC services to users. Unfortunately, the development and training opportunities to help future HPC service managers learn essential skills are scarce.

The US Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) is working with IBM Research to construct a brain-inspired supercomputing system for deep neural network learning and information discovery.

One of the more unusual pieces of news at this years ISC High Performance conference was the announcement by the National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi that it will be offering a cut-down version of the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer for more mainstream HPC users.

Episode 181: Addison Snell and Michael Feldman explore the most compelling stories coming out of ISC 17.

For the first time in several years, AMD has brought a server chip to market that provides some real competition to Intel and its near total domination of the datacenter market. The new AMD silicon, known as the EPYC 7000 series processors, come with up to 32 cores, along with a number of features that offer some useful differentiation against its Xeon competition.

The fourth-generation MareNostrum supercomputer is up and running at the Barcelona Supercomputer Centre (BSC), or at last the first phase of it is. When completed, it will contain the most interesting medley of processors of any supercomputer in existence. We asked Sergi Girona, Director of Operations at BSC, to describe the makeup of the new system and explain the rationale for building such a diverse machine.