SC13From Intel's point of view, today's hottest trend in high-performance computing – GPU acceleration – is just a phase, one that will be superseded by the advent of many-core CPUs, beginning with Chipzilla's next-generation Xeon Phi, codenamed "Knights Landing". "Tomorrow looks quite fundamentally different," Rajeeb Hazra, VP of …

ISC 2013The pitch that Intel's salespeople have to make to push Xeon Phi x86-based coprocessors just got a little easier and more interesting. And in the same week that a hybrid Xeon-Xeon Phi machine - China's Tianhe-2 - took the title as the fastest supercomputer in the world. And that is going to make life a little bit harder for …

GTC 2013Graphics chip maker Nvidia has barely begun to put a dent in the traditional high performance computing segment with its Tesla GPU coprocessors and it is already gearing up to take on new markets. The next target is big data, and as with parallel supercomputing, Nvidia is hoping to get the jump on rivals Intel and AMD, which …

Supercomputer makers used to stuffing processors and networks into machines to build clusters or shared memory systems have to adapt their machines to take advantage of various kinds of compute accelerators that offers cheaper flops, and Silicon Graphics is no exception. To that end, the company has reworked its high-end UV …

SC12The wait for the "Kepler2" GPU coprocessors based on the company's GK100 GPUs is over. That's the good news. The bad news is that you may have to hurt someone – or call in a favor at Nvidia – to get your hands on one, because so many people are going to be looking for one to goose their number-crunching. And you'll have to get …

FeatureAdapteva, an upstart RISC processor and co-processor designer that has tried to break into the big-time with its Epiphany chips for the past several years, is sick and tired of the old way of trying to get design wins to fund its future development. So it has started up a community project called Parallella that seeks to get …

Back in May, when Nvidia divulged some of the new features of its top-end GK110 graphics chip, the company said that two new features of the GPU, Hyper-Q and Dynamic Parallelism, would help GPUs run more efficiently and without the CPU butting in all the time. Nvidia is now dribbling out some benchmark test results ahead of the …

Cisco Live 2012Nothing is what it appears to be in the data center any more. Servers have integrated storage and switching, routers and switches are getting servers. And virtual switches and now virtual routers are running inside of servers and blade enclosures. Nothing seems to know its proper place any more. Maybe it is convergence. Maybe …

At the tail end of the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose this week, graphics chip juggernaut and compute wannabe Nvidia divulged the salient characteristics of the high-end "Kepler2" GK110 GPU chips that are going to be the foundation of the two largest supercomputers in the world and that are no doubt going to make their …

GTC 2012When Nvidia did a preview of its next-generation "Kepler" GPU chips back in March, the company's top brass said that they were saving some of the goodies in the Kepler design for the big event at Nvidia's GPU Technical Conference in San Jose, which runs this week. And true to its word, the Kepler GPUs do have some goodies that …

Nvidia is being a tease, but your good idea could land you with a Telsa GPU coprocessor based on the future "Kepler" GPU chip. Ahead of its GPU Technical Conference, which runs from May 13 through 17 in San Jose, the graphics chip and math motor maker has announced a competition called "What Would You Do With A Petaflops …

SC11Intel did not make any announcements of new processors or coprocessors at the SC11 supercomputing conference in Seattle, but it came about as close as it could without actually doing it. Rajeeb Hazra, general manager of high performance computing at Intel, hosted a lunch briefing with journalists to show off two things. The …

Intel has scored its first big win for its Many Integrated Core (MIC) x86 coprocessor, code-named "Knights Corner," in a hybrid supercomputer that will be installed at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas in January 2013. The 10-petaflops supercomputer will be nicknamed "Stampede", and will be right …

IDF 2011The chip world is moving from multicore to many-core, says Intel chief technology office Justin Rattner. In certain circles, such talk makes sense – a many-core chip includes many more cores than a multicore chip – and according to Rattner, the transition to a many-core world won't be as difficult as expected. At the Intel …

Supercomputer upstart Appro International has bagged a deal to supply Tsukuba University in Japan with an 800 teraflops machine based on Intel's impending "Sandy Bridge" Xeon E5 processors. The chip maker is hosting its Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco this week, but is not expected to divulge much about the server …

ISC'11Intel doesn't seem to be in a hurry to get its own line of Knights coprocessors for HPC applications into the field, and maybe it doesn't have to be. To be sure, Nvidia is stealing most of the oxygen in the conversation about coprocessors for accelerating supercomputer applications with its Tesla family of GPU accelerators. …

The idea that hybrid computing is becoming a mainstream technology was one of the major threads running through SC09 last week. Convey Computer, founded in 2006, has a different take on how to best implement hybrid architectures, to deliver better performance and to simplify use. Its approach is to add an FPGA coprocessor that …