Cray is going to build what will looks to be the worlds first ARM-based supercomputer. The system, known as Isambard, will be the basis of a new UK-based HPC service that will offer the machine as a platform to support scientific research and to evaluate ARM technologies for high performance computing. Installation of Isambard is scheduled to begin in March and be up and running before the end of the year.
Therelease date for AMDs Zen-based Naples CPU is still a few months away, but details about the new high performance server chip are already leaking into the public domain. Some of these specs are available in a recent report published at WCCFtech. Although muchremains to be revealed, Naples is shaping up to be the first credible Xeon competitor that Intel has encountered in several years.
Like many tech companies, IBM is starting the new year by making a few predictions. One of them has to do with a software concept they call a macroscope, a software technology that can be used to analyze the complexities of the physical world. IBM predicts that within five years, such technology will help us understand the Earths complexity in infinite detail.
In June 2016, China leapfrogged the HPC competition with its 93-petaflop Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer. Then in November it reached parity with the US on the TOP500 list in total number of systems and aggregate performance. But Chinas supercomputing capabilities are in many respects still a work in progress.
As societies grapple with the initial deployments of artificial intelligence, governments are beginning to outline policy approaches to deal with the inevitable consequences both positive and negative. In a report issued last month by President Obamas executive office, the outgoing administration sets some broad public policy prescriptions on how the US government should respond to the disruption that AI is poised to bring to the economy.
As the year draws to close, TOP500 News looks back at some of the most prominent trends of the past 12 months in the world of high performance computing. From machine learning to new processors to exascale, there were plenty of topics to hold our attention in 2016. Here are this year’s top five hits and misses:
Crays recent announcement about how its XC50 supercomputer plus Microsofts Cognitive Toolkit was used to scale up training of a neural network serves as a proof point on how topflight HPC technologies can be used to push the boundaries of deep learning. But the companys long game is to bring supercomputing into the realm of deeplearning and the broader category of data analytics in a more generalized fashion.
AMD has announced Radeon Instinct, a new line of GPUs aimed at accelerating machine learning applications in the datacenter. Designed to go up against the best NVIDIA can offer, the Instinct products deliver lots of performance and a number of high-end features. The products wereunveiled at AMD Technology Summit, which took place last week.
The US Department of Energys Exascale Computing Project (ECP) has changed its timeline for getting the first post-petascale system into the field. The new goal is to get an initial exascale system deployed sometime in 2021, with acceptance nine months after that. That shrinks the schedule significantly and puts the country back on a more competitive trajectory with regard to China and Japan.
For anyone that hasnt been hiding under a rock for the last few years, its become abundantly clear that the largest IT firms on the planet are moving quickly to build up their capabilities in artificial intelligence. But the largest of them all, Apple Inc., has been the least public about its plans. A revelation about a closed-door meeting in Europe suggests that might change.
