Aurora, built by Intel and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is the latest supercomputer to come online at the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory outside of Chicago and is among a new breed of exascale supercomputers that draws on artificial intelligence. When fully operational in 2024, Aurora is expected to be the first such computer that will be able to achieve two quintillion operations per second. Brain analytics and the design of batteries that last longer and charge faster are among the vast potential uses of exascale machines. Continue reading Aurora Supercomputer Targets 2 Quintillion Ops per Second

Europe is moving forward in the supercomputer space, with two new exascale machines set to come online. Jupiter will be installed at the Jülich Supercomputing Centre in Munich, with assembly set to start as early as Q1 2024. Scotland will be home to the UK’s first exascale supercomputer, to be hosted at the University of Edinburgh, with installation commencing in 2025. An exascale supercomputer can run calculations at speeds of one exaflop (1,000 petaflops) or greater. On completion, these two new supercomputers will land in the top percent of the world’s high-performers. Continue reading Germany, UK to Host Europe’s First Exascale Supercomputers

Cerebras Systems has unveiled its Andromeda AI supercomputer. With 13.5 million cores, it can calculate at the rate of 1 exaflop — roughly one quintillion (1 followed by 18 zeroes) operations — per second using a 16-bit floating point format. Andromeda’s brain is built of 16 linked Cerebras CS-2 systems, AI computers that use giant Wafer-Scale Engine 2 chips. Each chip has hundreds of thousands of cores, but is more compact and powerful than servers that use standard CPUs, according to Cerebras, which is making Andromeda available for commercial and academic research. Continue reading Cerebras Supercomputer Calculates at 1 Exaflop per Second

In a big win for the United States, the Department of Energy’s Frontier supercomputer at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee was ranked No. 1 in the Top500 worldwide performance contest and the first to top the quintillion operations-per-second (exascale) benchmark in a LINPACK test. The Department of Energy has said it will spend a total of $1.8 billion to build three machines with exascale performance. The Frontier, or OLCF-5, supercomputer (which features a theoretical peak performance of 2 exaflops) was built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise and is powered by AMD chips. Continue reading The U.S. Is Now Home to the World’s Fastest Supercomputer

During a panel at CES 2022, CTA specialist in government affairs Quentin Scholtz queried panelists from government and technology on their priorities and plans for stepping up effective enforcement against cyberattacks, especially those originating from nation states. Jamie Susskind, tech policy advisor for Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-Tennessee); former U.S. representative Will Hurd (R-Texas); and Samsung Electronics senior manager and counsel of public policy Eric Tamarkin offered complementary priorities on how to act in 2022 and going forward. Continue reading CES: Government, Tech Firms Partner to Curtail Cyberattacks

The world’s fastest supercomputers are ranked twice a year, and Innovative Computing Laboratory director Jack Dongarra, one academic behind the rankings, noted that the Top500 list of the world’s fastest high-performance computing (HPC) systems is showing “flattening performance” due to the slowdown of Moore’s Law. In the most recent ranking, Japan’s Fugaku ARM-based supercomputer set a record of 442 petaflops. In 2021, however, the first exascale — 1,000 petaflops — supercomputers are expected to appear, including one from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Continue reading ARM-Based Supercomputer Earns Top Spot in Global Ranking

The White House is planning a $1+ billion, five-year investment to fund 12 new research facilities on artificial intelligence, 5G, quantum information sciences and other emerging technologies. Federal agencies such as the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture will collaborate with private partners including major tech companies such as International Business Machines, Microsoft and others. The Trump administration proposes to spend 30 percent more on these technologies in the 2021 nondefense budget. Continue reading White House to Invest $1+ Billion in AI, Quantum Computing

Although millions of Americans are at home, the Senate did not include money for broadband infrastructure in the $3 trillion stimulus package under consideration. However, the current bill does include some funding to deploy mobile hot spots around the country. Proponents of accessible broadband will try to add that to any upcoming stimulus package. Meanwhile, the U.S. government, along with several Big Tech companies, is providing global access to 16 supercomputers to help researchers discover vaccines to combat the coronavirus. Continue reading Federal Government Considers Plans For Broadband Access

In advance of a meeting between President Trump and President Xi Jinping during the G20 summit in Japan, the Commerce Department added four Chinese companies and one Chinese institute to a blacklist that prevents them from buying U.S. tech products without a waiver. Those “entities” are Sugon (a leading supercomputer manufacturer); microchip makers Higon (AMD’s Chinese joint-venture partner), Chengdu Haiguang Integrated Circuit and Chengdu Haiguang Microelectronics Technology; and the Wuxi Jiangnan Institute of Computing Technology. Huawei was added to the list in May. Continue reading Ahead of G20, U.S. Adds Chinese Tech Entities to Blacklist

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is acquiring Cray, a pioneer in supercomputing, for about $1.4 billion. With 1,300 employees, Cray, based in Seattle, was founded by Seymour Cray in 1972 in Minnesota and purchased in 1996 by Silicon Graphics. The company was later sold in 2000 to Tera Computer, which changed its name to Cray. Cray designed some of the most powerful supercomputers used by the military, intelligence agencies and for civilian companies involved in weather prediction, pharmaceutical research and auto design. Continue reading HPE Acquires Cray, Advancing Supercomputing in the U.S.

This week, AMD announced a partnership with Cray to build a supercomputer called Frontier, which the two companies predict will become the world’s fastest supercomputer, capable of “exascale” performance when it is released in 2021. All told, they expect Frontier to be capable of 1.5 exaflops, performing somewhere around 50 times faster than the top supercomputers out today, and faster than the currently available top 160 supercomputers combined. Frontier will be built at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

Continue reading AMD’s New Frontier Will Be World’s Fastest Supercomputer

In an experiment described in Science, Chinese researchers used photons (also known as light particles) from the country’s quantum-communications satellite and established an instantaneous connection between two ground stations more than 744 miles apart. By doing so, say the experts, China is now a pioneer in harnessing matter and energy at a subatomic level — and a leader in the field of using quantum technology to build a global communications network that can’t be hacked. Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Energy is paying for companies to develop new supercomputers in pursuit of at least one “exascale” system. Continue reading U.S. and China Continue to Compete in Supercomputing Race

The latest trend in artificial intelligence involves implementing a much more efficient microprocessor rather than a whole cloud computing system to power deep learning research. These microprocessors, or graphical processing units (GPUs), are great at math-crunching skills, which makes them ideal for deep learning networks. Now, companies such as Google, Facebook, and various labs that run supercomputers, are using GPU-based computers to power their AI and deep learning operations. Continue reading AI: GPU-Based Computing is Proving Ideal for Deep Learning