IT/Datacenter & Super Computing News - Page 2

The new NREL Kestrel supercomputer details have been unveiled, with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) division of the US Department of Energy (DOE) packing some serious horsepower into its new supercomputer.

We're looking at a Minajatwa of silicon between Intel Sapphire Rapids Xeon CPUs, AMD EPYC "Genoa" CPUs, and NVIDIA H100 GPU accelerators. We have 44 petaflops of peak compute performance, up from just 8 petaflops on the previous-gen Eagle supercomputer.

CPU upgrades are big: Intel Sapphire Rapids Xeon CPUs with 52 cores, 112 threads each -- up from the 18 cores and 36 threads from the Intel Xeon-Gold Skylake CPUs in the Eagle supercomputer.

It's a huge day for supercomputers, with AMD powering the world's fastest supercomputer -- the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) "Frontier" supercomputer -- and now NVIDIA has announced it is powering the "Venado" supercomputer.

NVIDIA announced last week that Taiwan tech giants were preparing NVIDIA Grace CPU-powered servers, and now we have our first: the new Venado supercomputer that's being constructed by the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The new VENDAO supercomputer is capable of a huge 10 exaflops of peak AI performance.

It feels like a little bit of "me too" with NVIDIA's announcement of the Venado supercomputer, but more concrete details will be provided at the International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany later today. The new AMD CPU + GPU-powered Frontier supercomputer was teased yesterday, and now we have the NVIDIA CPU + GPU-powered Venado supercomputer here today.

The massively powerful new Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) supercomputer dubbed "Frontier" has broken the 1.1 exaflops barrier, becoming the first machine in the world to breach the historic exascale barrier.

The Department of Energy (DOE) will operate the new Frontier supercomputer in Tennessee, USA, with the system costing up to $1.8 billion to build and is now the world's fastest supercomputer, overtaking the Fugaku supercomputer in Japan. ORNL's new supercomputer is powered by AMD 3rd Gen EPYC CPUs and AMD's newest Radeon Instinct MI250X GPUs.

Inside, we have 74 purpose-built HPE Cray EX supercomputer cabinets with 9408 AMD EPYC CPUs for a total of (a bonkers) 8,730,112 processing cores, and 37,632 AMD Instinct MI250X GPUs with a power efficiency rating of 52.23 gigaflops/watt. There's 700PB of data storage with peak write speeds of an insane 5TB/sec (5000GB/sec).

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.