Tag Archives: supercomputers

Supercomputer Researcher Wins Turing Award for Boosting Ultrapowerful Machines

Jack Dongarra, a researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, won the 2021 Turing Award for software that’s unlocked the power of the world’s biggest computers. Many earlier recipients boosted supercomputers indirectly, but Dongarra has specialized in code that speeds up scientific calculations and gets it to run on machines with thousands of processors. …

Read More »

Meta has a giant new AI supercomputer to shape the metaverse

Meta, the tech giant previously known as Facebook, revealed Monday that it’s built one of the world’s fastest supercomputers, a behemoth called the Research SuperCluster, or RSC. With 6,080 graphics processing units packaged into 760 Nvidia A100 modules, it’s the fastest machine built for AI tasks, Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg says. That processing power is in the same league as …

Read More »

Nvidia’s Grace AI chip leaves Intel processors behind

Nvidia has a new chip in the works for boosting artificial intelligence and other high-performance computing work: Grace, a design slated to arrive in mammoth supercomputers in 2023. Instead of accelerating conventional Intel-powered servers, though, the design includes its own built-in Arm processors. Nvidia’s current brainiest chip, the A100, is typically yoked to Intel Xeon processors. Nvidia chips do the …

Read More »

US restricts 7 Chinese supercomputing entities over national security concerns

The United States is expanding its list of restricted companies and government labs whose supercomputing abilities are “used by China’s military actors, its destabilizing military modernization efforts, and/or weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs,” the US Commerce Department said in a statement Thursday. Inclusion on the Entity List, as it’s called, means these groups have to apply for licenses from …

Read More »

Good news for future Macs: The fastest supercomputer uses Arm chips

In a development that oddly enough bodes well for Apple Macs, a Fujitsu machine has been named fastest in the world. The system, called Fugaku and installed at the Riken Center for Computational Science in Japan, features processors that are members of the Arm family that Apple will use in its Mac personal computers later this year. Fugaku uses Fujitsu …

Read More »

Microsoft builds massive supercomputer for smarter AI

Microsoft has built an enormous supercomputer for artificial intelligence work, a new direction for its Azure cloud computing service. The machine has 285,000 processor cores boosted by 10,000 graphics chips for OpenAI, a company that wants to ensure AI technology helps humans. Microsoft announced the machine at its Build conference for developers on Tuesday. (For more details on the event, …

Read More »

Nvidia’s new data center GPU packs 20 times the performance of its predecessor

For the most up-to-date news and information about the coronavirus pandemic, visit the WHO and CDC websites. Whenever a new GPU or CPU hits the market, it boasts faster speeds, usually in the magnitude of two or three times better than before — at most. But Nvidia on Thursday blew right past those normally strong performance increases. The company’s new …

Read More »

Sixteen supercomputers tackle coronavirus cures in US

The US government, industry and academia have pooled efforts to fight the coronavirus by offering researchers access to some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers from IBM, along with cloud-computing resources from Amazon, Microsoft and Google. The COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium can be used for work like projecting the disease’s spread and modeling possible medicines. “By pooling the supercomputing …

Read More »

El Capitan supercomputer to blow past rivals, with 2 quintillion calculations per second

Hewlett Packard Enterprise and AMD will deliver what they expect to be the world’s fastest supercomputer in 2023, a $600 million machine at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory called El Capitan they promise will perform at 2 exaflops, or 2 quintillion calculations per second. That’s fast enough that if the world’s human population could perform one such calculation per second, it …

Read More »

Google quantum computer leaves old

A Google quantum computer has far outpaced ordinary computing technology, an achievement called quantum supremacy that’s an important milestone for a revolutionary way of processing data. Google disclosed the results in the journal Nature on Wednesday. The achievement came after more than a decade of work at Google, including the use of its own quantum computing chip, called Sycamore. “Our machine performed …

Read More »