IT/Datacenter & Super Computing News - Page 3

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.