Cray has been awarded a $600 million contract to build the first exascale supercomputer for the National Nuclear Security Administration, the US Department of Energy and the NNSA announced Tuesday. Named El Capitan, the supercomputer will be among the fastest known in the world and will help manage the US’ nuclear stockpile. It’s expected to …
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China is home to 219 of the world’s supercomputers while the US houses 116, the latest report from Top500 says. But the two highest-powered supercomputers are still Summit and Sierra, owned by IBM in the US. Supercomputers, massive computing machines, are used for power-intensive programs like quantum physics, forecasting global climate change effects, designing engines and aircraft, reconstructing the history …
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Hewlett Packard Enterprise is concentrating more supercomputing power in its own hands, announcing Friday a plan to acquire Cray just weeks after the high-performance computing specialist announced it’ll make what could become the fastest supercomputer ever. HPE said it’s agreed to acquire Seattle-based Cray in an all-cash deal worth about $1.3 billion expected to close by January 2020. The acquisition of …
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The “exascale” computing race is getting a new entrant called Frontier, a $600 million machine with Cray and AMD technology that could become the world’s fastest when it arrives at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 2021. Frontier should be able to perform 1.5 quintillion calculations per second, a level called 1.5 exaflops and enough to claim the performance crown, the …
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The US now can claim the top two machines on a list of the 500 fastest supercomputers, as Sierra, an IBM machine for nuclear weapons research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, edged out a Chinese system that last year was the very fastest. The Top500 list ranks supercomputers based on how quickly they perform a mathematical calculation test called Linpack. …
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Editor’s note Sept. 20: Hewlett Packard Enterprise said Wednesday its Spaceborne computer successfully powered up. The original story about the announcement, from Aug 11, is below. HAL seemed to have little trouble in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” but here’s the problem with computers in space: a constant stream of cosmic rays seriously disrupt electronics. That’s why Hewlett Packard Enterprise and NASA …
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According to Nvidia, the age of Moore’s Law is coming to an end. The solution? We don’t just need to get smaller, we need to get smarter. Nvidia took to the stage at Computex in Taipei today, talking up the future of artificial intelligence and machine learning, all powered by its GPU computing technology and what it’s calling the Isaac …
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There are lots of Neon Genesis Evangelion fans in the world, and many of them hope to ride Universal Studios Japan’s new Evangelion-themed VR roller coaster ride. That means there will be some long queues at the park. To combat the tedium of these lines, the theme park made MAGI Mobile, a companion app that entertains you while you wait …
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Things didn’t go so well when the humans of “2001: A Space Odyssey” tangled with artificial intelligence. Fortunately, Google’s Allo is much friendlier. In the classic 1968 movie, astronaut Dave Bowman asked eerie supercomputer HAL to open the ship’s pod bay doors and let him back inside. HAL infamously replied, “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.” Happily, …
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IBM already has a supercomputing contract with the US Department of Energy. Los Alamos National Laboratory IBM will team up with Nvidia and the US Department of Energy to launch two new supercomputer centers of excellence. These efforts primarily revolve around making sure applications can take advantage of supercomputing horsepower and gathering feedback from developers, engineers and scientists. The centers, …
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