Looking at TOP500 Trends for Exascale at SC18

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the semi-annual TOP500 BoF presentation by Jack Dongarra.

The TOP500 list of supercomputers serves as a “Who’s Who” in the field of High Performance Computing (HPC). It started as a list of the most powerful supercomputers in the world and has evolved to a major source of information about trends in HPC. The 52nd TOP500 list will be published in November 2018 just in time for SC18. This BoF will present detailed analyses of the TOP500 and discuss the changes in the HPC marketplace during the past years. The BoF is meant as an open forum for discussion and feedback between the TOP500 authors and the user community.

After that, we do our Catch of the Week.

See our complete coverage of SC18

Sign up for our insideHPC Newsletter

Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed

Running Down the TOP500 at SC18

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks back on the highlights of SC18 and the newest TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers.

[caption id="attachment_71623" align="alignright" width="300"] Buddy Bland shows off Summit, the world's fastest supercomputer at ORNL.[/caption]

The latest TOP500 list of the world's fastest supercomputers is out, a remarkable ranking that shows five Department of Energy supercomputers in the top 10, with the first two captured by Summit at Oak Ridge and Sierra at Livermore. With the number one and number two systems on the planet, the "Rebel Alliance" vendors of IBM, Mellanox, and NVIDIA stand far and tall above the others.

Summit widened its lead as the number one system, improving its High Performance Linpack (HPL) performance from 122.3 to 143.5 petaflops since its debut on the previous list in June 2018. Sierra also added to its HPL result from six months ago, going from 71.6 to 94.6 petaflops, enough to bump it from the number three position to number two. Both are IBM-built supercomputers, powered by Power9 CPUs and NVIDIA V100 GPUs.

At number five is Piz Daint, a Cray XC50 system installed at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) in Lugano, Switzerland. At 21.2 petaflops, it maintains its standing as the most powerful system in Europe. It is powered by a combinations of Intel Xeon processors and NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs

Trinity, a Cray XC40 system operated by Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories improved its performance to 20.2 petaflops, enough to move it up one position to the number six spot. It uses Intel Xeon Phi processors, the only top ten system to do so.

See our complete coverage of SC18

Sign up for our insideHPC Newsletter

Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed

A Look at the Spaceborne Supercomputer One Year Later

In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team sits down with Mark Fernandez from HPE to discuss the Spaceborne Supercomputer that it currently orbiting the planet in the International Space Station.

Last week, HPE announced it is opening high-performance computing capabilities to astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS) as part of its continued experiments on the Spaceborne Computer project.

Spaceborne Computer is the first commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) supercomputer that HPE and NASA launched into space for a one-year experiment to test resiliency and performance, achieving one teraFLOP (a trillion floating point operations per second) and successfully operating on the International Space Station (ISS).  After completing its one-year mission proving it can withstand harsh conditions of space – such as zero gravity, unscheduled power outages, and unpredictable levels of radiation – Spaceborne Computer will now, for the first time ever, open its supercomputing capabilities for use aboard the ISS. These “above-the-cloud” services will allow space explorers and experimenters to run analyses directly in space instead of transmitting data to and from Earth for insight.

After that, we do our Catch of the Week.

Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * RSS Feed

Sign up for our insideHPC Newsletter.