IT/Datacenter & Super Computing - Page 2

We all know that turning ray tracing on radically reduces performance, so any help in the performance department is not only welcomed, it's begged for.

A team of researchers from the UK, US, and Portugal have suggested that there's some huge untapped performance using a hybrid of classical ray tracing algorithms with quantum computing. Ray tracing workloads that were boosted by up to 190% by quantum computing.

How? By limiting the amount of computations needed by each individual ray. The researchers demonstrated this by rendering a small, 128x128 ray traced image in three approaches: classical rendering, non-optimized quantum rendering, and optimized quantum rendering.

NVIDIA announced at Computex 2022 today in Taiwan that Taiwan's leading computer makers are preparing their first wave of systems powered by NVIDIA's new Grace CPU Superchip and Grace Hopper Superchip.

The likes of ASUS, Foxconn Industrial Internet, GIGABYTE, QCT, Supermicro, and Wiwynn will have NVIDIA Grace-powered systems in the first half of 2023. The upcoming servers are destined for the world of AI, high-performance computing (HPC), cloud gaming, digital twins, and so much more.

Ian Buck, vice president of Hyperscale and HPC at NVIDIA said: "A new type of data center is emerging-AI factories that process and refine mountains of data to produce intelligence-and NVIDIA is working closely with our Taiwan partners to build the systems that enable this transformation. These new systems from our partners, powered by our Grace Superchips, will bring the power of accelerated computing to new markets and industries globally".

GIGABYTE has just announced its new "supercharged, scalable server" in the G492-PD0, which supports NVIDIA's new Ampere Altra Max or Altra processor.

The new GIGABYTE G492-PD0 not only packs NVIDIA's new Ampere Altra Max or Altra processor, but also NVIDIA HGX A100 Tensor Core GPUs for the highest performance in cloud infrastructure, HPC, AI, and more. Ampere's Altra Max CPU packs 128 Armv8.2 cores per socket with Arm's M1 core, with high performance efficiency and minimized total cost of ownership.

GIGABYTE is using a novel cooling solution that dedicates a cooling chamber for the NVIDIA accelerators and GPUs used in the networking expansion slots... something that allows for the highest possible airflow to cool the high-performance components.

NVIDIA's new Hopper GPU architecture has been unveiled and with it comes some new DGX H100 systems powered by the monster new NVIDIA H100 GPU.

The new NVIDIA DGX H100 system has 8 x H100 GPUs per system, all connected as one gigantic insane GPU through 4th-Generation NVIDIA NVLink connectivity. This enables up to 32 petaflops at new FP8 precision, a gigantic 6x performance improvement over the previous-gen Ampere-based GPUs.

NVIDIA will be using the new Hopper-based DGX H100 systems as the "building blocks" of the next-gen NVIDIA DGX POD and NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD AI infrastructure platforms. NVIDIA's new DGX SuperPOD architecture has the new NVIDIA NVLink Switch System -- capable of up to 32 nodes and a total of 256 x H100 GPUs. At this level, we're talking about 1 exaflops of FP8 AI performance, also 6x more than its predecessor.

TSMC has just announced its N4X process technology, which has been tailor-made for the demanding workloads of high-performance computing (HPC) products.

The new N4X process technology is the first of TSMC's HPC-focused technology offerings, which the company says "representing ultimate performance and maximum clock frequencies in the 5-nanometer family. The "X" designation is reserved for TSMC technologies that are developed specifically for HPC products".

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) enhanced its already impressive technology with features made for HPC products to create N4X, these features include:

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has chosen Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to build its third-gen, high-performance computing (HPC) system, called Kestrel.

NREL's new Kestrel supercomputer was named after a falcon that has "keen eyesight and intelligence, Kestrel's moniker is apropos for its mission-to rapidly advance the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) energy research and development (R&D) efforts to deliver transformative energy solutions to the entire United States".

The new supercomputer will be installed in the fall of 2022 at NREL's Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF) data center and will have a mind-boggling 44 petaflops of computing power. But the most interesting thing here is that NREL's new Kestrel supercomputer is powered by future next-gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors (Sapphire Rapids) and NVIDIA A100NEXT Tensor Core GPUs "to accelerate AI", not play Crysis.

AMD engineers have been working on something from the future it seems, with a new patent called "Look Ahead Teleportation for Reliable Computation in Multi-SIMD Quantum Processor".

The patent in question is for a system that would use quantum teleportation in order to boost a quantum computer's reliability, while at the same time reducing the number of qubits required for a given calculation. This "teleportation" technology would help solve scaling issues and calculation errors that arise from system instability.

One of the main issues behind quantum development is once you start pushing the pedal to the metal, there are major issues when it comes to scalability and stability. Quantum computing is far different to the 0s and 1s of traditional technology, so AMD's new teleportation patent is quite an important step towards solving that issue.

Pawsey Supercomputing Centre down in Perth, Australia chose Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) for its next-gen Setonix supercomputer, but now we have some more details on the specs inside of the new supercomputer.

Setonix will have over 200,000 AMD EPYC "Milan" CPU cores, over 750 AMD Mi-Next GPUs with 128GB of VRAM per GPU, over 548TB of system memory, near-node NVMe storage, 15PB ClusterStor Lustre filesystem with 2.7PB SSD and 90PB of Ceph storage.

The additional details on Pawsey's next-gen Setonix supercomputer were provided by Pawsey CTO Ugo Varetto.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) have just unveiled its next-gen LUMI supercomputer, which is powered by AMD's next-gen Zen 3-based EPYC processors and Radeon Instinct GPUs.

The new LUMI supercomputer will find its new home in Kajaani, Finland in 2021 -- and will be using the HPE Cray EX architecture to spin up 550 Petaflops of peak horsepower. The new LUMI supercomputer will be a part of EuroHPC's GPU-accelerated supercomputing platform powered by next-gen AMD CPUs and GPUs.

Forrest Norrod, senior vice president and general manager, data center and embedded systems group, AMD explains:

D-Wave Systems Inc. has just announced that it has expanded its Leap quantum cloud service to two new markets: India and Australia.

This move is a big deal for both India and Australia as it means developers, researchers, and businesses in those countries get access to something quite incredible -- and something not available in their respective countries: access to D-Wave 2000Q quantum computers.

D-Wave Systems recently opened up their D-Wave 2000Q quantum computers over the same Leap quantum cloud service to researchers and scientists to help out in the COVID-19 pandemic. This news now unlocks India and Australia researchers access to use the quantum computers for their tasks.

ARM is in the news for all the right reasons today, where first Apple announced plans that it would be transitioning away from Intel -- where it has been a partner for its processors for many years now, to ARM. The second, is that ARM chips now power the world's fastest supercomputer -- and that supercomputer, is insanely fast.

The new RIKEN Center for Computational Science's Fugaku supercomputer packs Fujitsu's new 48-core A64FX system-on-a-chip. It has 158,976 of these 48-core processors, meaning there is a mind boggling 7,299,072 processor cores powering the Fugaku supercomputer. Yeah, 7.29 million CPU cores -- you read that right.

This means the new Fugaku supercomputer is 2.8 times more powerful than the previous #1 supercomputer; Oak Ridge National Lab's Summit supercomputer. Summit has 2,414,592 processor cores with 148 petaflops of computer performance, compared to Fugaku and its game-changing ARM chips pumping out 415 petaflops.

AMD along with its technology partner in Penguin Computing Inc. which is a division of SMART Global Holdings, Inc. have announced that they are lending AMD-powered, high-performance computing (HPC) resources from the AMD HPC Fund for COVID-19 research.

The high-performance computing systems will be used by New York University (NYU), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Rice University. Others will follow, but these three were the first out of the gate from the AMD HPC Fund. AMD will also contribute a cloud-based system that is powered by AMD EPYC and AMD Radeon Instinct hardware on-site at Penguin Computing.

In total, AMD is donating a rather huge 7 petaflops of compute performance to the fight against COVID-19. AMD president and CEO, Dr. Lisa Su, said: "High performance computing technology plays a critical role in modern viral research, deepening our understanding of how specific viruses work and ultimately accelerating the development of potential therapeutics and vaccines".

NVIDIA launched its next generation Ampere GPU architecture during its online GTC 2020 keynote, with company founder and CEO Jensen Huang delivering the GPU Technology Conference 2020 keynote from his house.

The first GPU on the Ampere architecture announced was the new A100, which you can read all about right here -- as well as the new DGX A100 supercomputer, which you can read about here. The new DGX A100 supercomputer is an absolutely beast, rolling out as a third-generation AI supercomputer from NVIDIA super-charged by the Ampere GPU architecture and ridiculously fast A100 GPU.

NVIDIA's new DGX A100 supercomputer is now helping the fight against COVID-19, with Rick Stevens, associate laboratory director for Computing, Environment and Life Sciences at Argonne, explaining: "We're using America's most powerful supercomputers in the fight against COVID-19, running AI models and simulations on the latest technology available, like the NVIDIA DGX A100".

AMD and NVIDIA have just joined the HPC COVID-19 Consortium, with the White House supercomputing partnership that is joining US tech companies together for the effort.

The HPC COVID-19 Consortium is a push by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the US Department of Energy, and IBM teaming with the US government, tech industry, and academic leaders who are volunteering free compute time and resources to COVID-19 researchers.

Researchers wanting to tap untold amounts of supercomputing power can do so by applying to the HPC COVID-19 Consortium, and if approved, will receive access to resources to help super-speed their research. 4th Chief Technology Officer of the United States, Michael Kratsios, also said that there are over 402 Petaflops across 105,000 nodes, 3.5 million CPU cores, and 41,000 GPUs -- and these numbers are only increasing.

D-Wave Systems has announced that it is offering immediate, and free access to its quantum computers to anyone who is working on responses to COVID-19.

The company said that its partners and customers in Kyocera Corporation, NEC Solution Innovators, Menten AI and Volkswagen and others will also be providing engineering teams that will assist researchers in using the quantum computers, in order to formulate problems and hopefully find solutions to COVID-19.

D-Wave Systems will be providing access to its quantum computers through tis Leap 2 quantum cloud service, offering it to anyone working on COVID-19 response in the United States, and across 35 countries throughout Europe and Asia. D-Wave Systems explained: "Leap 2 includes the hybrid solver service designed to bring both classical and quantum resources to quickly and precisely solve highly complex problems with up to 10,000 fully connected variables".

AMD has secured itself another design win for a crazy-specced supercomputer, where its kick ass EPYC Rome CPUs will power the US Navy's new Cray Shasta supercomputer.

The new Cray Shasta supercomputer will find a new home with the US Navy's Department of Defense Supercomputing Resource Center (DSRC), where it will become a part of the High Performance Computing Modernization Program. It packs some serious computing power, with a peak theoretical computing capability of 12.8 PetaFLOPS.

This is all thanks to:

UK's weather service called the Met Office has announced that it will be spending a whopping 1.2 billion pounds (USD$1.6 billion) on the world's fastest weather supercomputer.

According to the announcement, the Met Office will be purchasing the world's most powerful weather supercomputer that is estimated to be ten times the cost of their current one called Cray XC40. The new weather supercomputer will also have upgraded accuracy that blows UK's current forecaster out of the water. The new supercomputer will create a "digital twin" of our atmosphere with data and be able to create forcasts for area's that are just down to 1,000 meters (62 miles) in diameter.

This is impressive when compared to the current systems 10km forecast diameter. The report also states that the new weather supercomputer will go into service in 2022, and at the time of installation it will already be six times more powerful than the current Cray XC40. Power level jumps won't stop there, as in five years time the new supercomputer will get an upgrade bumping it up in performance by a further three times. This means that by the time the new supercomputer is at full power it will be nearly 20 times more powerful than the UK's current machine.

Indiana University is currently building out its exciting new Big Red 200 supercomputer, which will have an insane amount of computing power, as well as some delicious new technology including AMD EPYC CPUs and unreleased NVIDIA Ampere GPUs. Check out the video of the initial first phase build:

The university is celebrating its 200th year, which is where the name 'Big Red 200' comes from (red is also Indiana University's color scheme). Inside, Big Red 200 packs 672 dual-socket nodes that will be powered by AMD's kick ass EPYC 7742 'Rome' CPUs that each pack 64 cores and 128 threads for a total of yes-it-can-run-crysis 86,016 cores and 172,032 threads.

The first phase sees the CPUs being deployed thanks to AMD EPYC 7742 chips, but the university had the stars aligned as they were offered to use NVIDIA's next-gen Ampere GPUs. At first, Indiana University was going to use NVIDIA's current-gen Tesla V100 GPUs that are based on the Volta GPU architecture -- but Brad Wheeler, the vice president for information technology and chief information officer at IU explained they "decided to take the machine in two phases" when NVIDIA offered something special "at the last minute".

Intel recently announced its new codename Horse Ridge chip, a new cryogenic control chip that will assist quantum computing systems. The new chip is being made available to commercially viable quantum computers, with the company co-developing the Horse Ridge chip between Intel Labs and QuTech.

Horse Ridge is an exciting cryogenic control chip that is capable of controlling multiple qubits (quantum bits) at the same time, with Intel explaining that this specific part of a quantum computer system is an "essential feature". Quantum computing is still in its early days, with Intel putting its efforts into the interconnects and control electronics -- and not the production of the qubits.

Right now, quantum computers use existing electronic tools to link quantum systems inside of a cryogenic refrigerator -- this actually holds back qubit performance so Intel is being Intel and wants to push that. Current quantum chips and computers require absolute zero cooling to work, while Horse Ridge can actually work at just over absolute zero -- 4 Kelvin.

In a world-first, scientists from the University of Bristol and the Technical University of Denmark have achieved quantum teleportation of data between two computer chips thanks to quantum entanglement.

This breakthrough is significant in the fact that the scientists sent the information from one chip to another chip -- while they were physically separated, and had nothing to do with each other. The researchers have said that this recent breakthrough could open the world of quantum computers and quantum internet.

The team used a pair of entangled photons on the chip, and then performed a quantum measurement on one of the photons -- and thanks to quantum entanglement (where the two particles are intertwined they can communicate over extremely long distances) the other chip saw its properties changed, almost magically.