This here is an interesting piece of tech news for sure, in that Intel has already scored a pretty massive design win for not one, but two upcoming products. Intel's "Future Xeon Scalable Processors" and the company's "Xe Compute Architecture" have been tapped by the U.S. Department of Energy for incorporation into the new AURORA Supercomputer - one that will deliver exascale performance. AURORA is to be developed in a partnership between Intel and Cray, using the later's Shasta systems and its "Slingshot" networking fabric. But these are not the only Intel elements in the supercomputer design: Intel's DC Optane persistent memory will also be employed (in an as-of-yet-unavailable version of it as well), making this a full win across the prow for Intel.

Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. today announced it has added AMD EPYC processors to its Cray CS500 product line. To meet the growing needs of high-performance computing (HPC), the combination of AMD EPYC 7000 processors with the Cray CS500 cluster systems offers Cray customers a flexible, high-density system tuned for their demanding environments. The powerful platform lets organizations tackle a broad range of HPC workloads without the need to rebuild and recompile their x86 applications.

"Cray's decision to offer the AMD EPYC processors in the Cray CS500 product line expands its market opportunities by offering buyers an important new choice," said Steve Conway, senior vice president of research at Hyperion Research. "The AMD EPYC processors are expressly designed to provide highly scalable, energy- and cost-efficient performance in large and midrange clusters."

The fiftieth TOP500 list of the fastest supercomputers in the world has China overtaking the US in the total number of ranked systems by a margin of 202 to 143. It is the largest number of supercomputers China has ever claimed on the TOP500 ranking, with the US presence shrinking to its lowest level since the list's inception 25 years ago.

Just six months ago, the US led with 169 systems, with China coming in at 160. Despite the reversal of fortunes, the 143 systems claimed by the US gives them a solid second place finish, with Japan in third place with 35, followed by Germany with 20, France with 18, and the UK with 15.

The United States has been being pushed down in the TOP500 standings for some time courtesy China, whom has taken the 1st and 2nd place seats from the US with their Sunway TaihuLight and Tianhe-2 Supercomputers (at a Linpack performance of 93 and 33.9 Petaflops, respectively). It seemed though the crown was stolen from America, 3rd place was relatively safe for the former champs. Not so. America has been pushed right off the podium in the latest TOP500 refresh... not by China though, but Switzerland?

Developing supercomputers isn't for the faint of heart. Much less it is for those that are looking for fast development and deployment time-frames. And as such, even as the world's supercomputers are getting increasingly faster and exorbitantly expensive to develop and deploy, players who want to stay ahead have to think ahead as well. To this end, the US Department of Energy has awarded a total of $258M in research contracts to six of the US's foremost tech companies to accelerate the development of Exascale Supercomputer technologies (AMD, Cray, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM, Intel, and NVIDIA.) These companies will be working over a three year contract period, and will have to support at least 40% of the project cost - to help develop the technologies needed to build an exascale computer for 2021. It isn't strange that the companies accepted the grant and jumped at the opportunity: 60% savings in research and development they'd have to do for themselves is nothing to scoff at.

Supercomputers birthed from the project are expected to be in the exaFLOPS scale of computing performance, which is around 50 times more processing power than the generation of supercomputers being installed now. Since traditional supercomputing knowledge and materials are known to falter at the objective level of exaFLOPS performance, the PathForward program - which looks to ensure achievement of such systems in a timely fashion to ensure US leadership in the field of supercomputing - will need to see spurred research and development, which the $258M grant is looking out to do.

A group of leading technology companies today announced the Gen-Z Consortium, an industry alliance working to create and commercialize a new scalable computing interconnect and protocol. This flexible, high-performance memory semantic fabric provides a peer-to-peer interconnect that easily accesses large volumes of data while lowering costs and avoiding today's bottlenecks. The alliance members include AMD, ARM, Cavium Inc., Cray, Dell EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Huawei, IBM, IDT, Lenovo, Mellanox Technologies, Micron, Microsemi, Red Hat, Samsung, Seagate, SK hynix, Western Digital Corporation, and Xilinx.

Modern computer systems have been built around the assumption that storage is slow, persistent and reliable, while data in memory is fast but volatile. As new storage class memory technologies emerge that drive the convergence of storage and memory attributes, the programmatic and architectural assumptions that have worked in the past are no longer optimal. The challenges associated with explosive data growth, real-time application demands, the emergence of low latency storage class memory, and demand for rack scale resource pools require a new approach to data access.

Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. today announced the launch of the Cray CS-Storm -- a high-density accelerator compute system based on the Cray CS300 cluster supercomputer. Featuring up to eight NVIDIA Tesla GPU accelerators and a peak performance of more than 11 teraflops per node, the Cray CS-Storm system is one of the most powerful single-node cluster architectures available today.

Designed to support highly scalable applications in areas such as energy, life sciences, financial services, and geospatial intelligence, the Cray CS-Storm provides exceptional performance, energy efficiency and reliability within a small footprint. The system leverages the supercomputing architecture of the air-cooled Cray CS300 system, and includes the Cray Advanced Cluster Engine cluster management software, the complete Cray Programming Environment on CS, and NVIDIA Tesla K40 GPU accelerators. The Cray CS-Storm system includes Intel Xeon E5 2600 v2 processors.

Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. today announced the Cray CS300 line of cluster supercomputers and the Cray XC30 supercomputers are now available with the NVIDIA Tesla K40 GPU accelerators. Designed to solve the most demanding supercomputing challenges, the NVIDIA Tesla K40 provides 40 percent higher peak performance than its predecessor, the Tesla K20X GPU.

"The addition of the NVIDIA K40 GPUs furthers our vision for Adaptive Supercomputing, which provides outstanding performance with a computing architecture that accommodates powerful CPUs and highly-advanced accelerators from leading technology companies like NVIDIA," said Barry Bolding, vice president of marketing at Cray. "We have proven that acceleration can be productive at high scalability with Cray systems such as 'Titan', 'Blue Waters', and most recently with the delivery of a Cray XC30 system at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS). Together with Cray's latest OpenACC 2.0 compiler, the new NVIDIA K40 GPUs can process larger datasets, reach higher levels of acceleration and provide more efficient compute performance, and we are pleased these features are now available to customers across our complete portfolio of supercomputing solutions."

Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. today announced the Company has broadened its support for accelerators and coprocessors, and is now selling the Cray XC30 series of supercomputers with NVIDIA Tesla K20X GPU accelerators and Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors. This marks the latest step in Cray's Adaptive Supercomputing vision, which is focused on delivering innovative systems that integrate diverse technologies like multi-core and many-core processing into a unified architecture.

"Our first experience with climate and materials science applications showed that replacing one of the multi-core processors in the XC30 with an NVIDIA Tesla GPU boosts application performance and disproportionally reduced energy to solution," said Thomas Schulthess, professor at ETH Zurich and director of the Swiss National Supercomputing Center, which was one of the first Cray customers to order a hybrid Cray XC30 system. "This provides necessary proof of principle in favor of hybrid compute nodes as a promising solution to the energy challenges we face in supercomputing."

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) have achieved a major breakthrough in the battle to fight the spread of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) using NVIDIA Tesla GPU accelerators, NVIDIA today announced.

Featured on the cover of the latest issue of Nature, the world's most-cited interdisciplinary science journal, a new paper details how UIUC researchers collaborating with researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine have, for the first time, determined the precise chemical structure of the HIV "capsid," a protein shell that protects the virus's genetic material and is a key to its virulence. Understanding this structure may hold the key to the development of new and more effective antiretroviral drugs to combat a virus that has killed an estimated 25 million people and infected 34 million more.

Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (NASDAQ: CRAY) today announced the launch of the Company's next generation high-end supercomputing systems -- the Cray XC30 supercomputer. Previously code-named "Cascade," the Cray XC30 supercomputer is the Company's most-advanced high performance computing system ever built. The Cray XC30 combines the new Aries interconnect, Intel Xeon processors, Cray's powerful and fully-integrated software environment, and innovative power and cooling technologies to create a production supercomputer that is designed to scale high performance computing (HPC) workloads of more than 100 petaflops.

Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (NASDAQ: CRAY) today announced the Cray XE6 and Cray XE6m supercomputers are now available with the new AMD Opteron 6300 Series processor, using its next-generation "Piledriver" core. With a performance-per-watt that is up to 40 percent higher than prior generations, these new AMD (NYSE: AMD) Opteron processors are designed to enhance power efficiency with more application performance within the same power budget.

"Cray supercomputers are specifically designed to allow our customers to easily upgrade their systems so they can take advantage of the latest, most innovative processing technologies while also reducing their total-cost-of-ownership over the life of the system," said Peg Williams, Cray's senior vice president of high performance computing systems. "We believe the new AMD Opteron 6300 Series processors will significantly improve the performance and efficiency for Cray customers upgrading their current Cray XE6 and Cray XE6m systems. We look forward to delivering this capability to our customers."

Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. today announced the launch of the Company's new series of production hybrid supercomputers -- the Cray XK7 system -- in conjunction with today's debut of the Cray XK7 supercomputer nicknamed "Titan" located at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). Titan is capable of more than 20 petaflops of high performance computing (HPC) power and is the world's most powerful supercomputer for open science.

The Titan system is a 200-cabinet Cray XK7 supercomputer with 18,688 compute nodes each consisting of a 16-Core AMD Opteron 6200 Series processor and an NVIDIA Tesla K20 GPU Accelerator. Titan was upgraded from a Cray XT5 supercomputer nicknamed "Jaguar."

Intel Corporation today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement with Cray Inc. to acquire certain assets related to its high-performance computing (HPC) interconnect program. With the agreement, Intel gains access to Cray's world-class interconnect personnel and intellectual property.

The Cray interconnect team is responsible for the award-winning Gemini interconnect as well as the upcoming Aries interconnect, designed to work in Cray's next-generation supercomputer, codenamed "Cascade," which will integrate Intel Xeon processors. The transaction is expected to close before the end of the current quarter, subject to customary closing conditions being met.

In an effort to make it easier for programmers to take advantage of parallel computing, NVIDIA, Cray Inc., the Portland Group (PGI), and CAPS enterprise announced today a new parallel-programming standard, known as OpenACC.

Initially developed by PGI, Cray, and NVIDIA, with support from CAPS, OpenACC is a new open parallel programming standard designed to enable the millions of scientific and technical programmers to easily take advantage of the transformative power of heterogeneous CPU/GPU computing systems.

OpenACC allows parallel programmers to provide simple hints, known as "directives," to the compiler, identifying which areas of code to accelerate, without requiring programmers to modify or adapt the underlying code itself. By exposing parallelism to the compiler, directives allow the compiler to do the detailed work of mapping the computation onto the accelerator.

NVIDIA's Tesla 20 series GPU compute processors have made their way into CRAY's latest supercomputer, the XE6. In these, Tesla units are installed into blades, which are networked using Cray's fast Gemini system-interconnect increasing the throughput, or efficiency of these GPUs in HPC applications. "The combination of new Gemini system interconnect - paired with NVIDIA's Tesla - will provide XE6 a powerful combination of scalability and production-quality, GPU-based high performance computing (HPC) in a single system," said Cray VP Barry Bolding. According to him, the supercomputing giant's move to adopt Tesla into its blade systems (which populate the high-end segment) is after seeing the technology mature on the company's mid-range and deskside systems. Bolding noted that the company will collaborate further with NVIDIA in advancing GPU compute processors for HPC applications.

A team led by NVIDIA has been awarded a research grant of $25 million by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. Defense Department's research and development arm, to address what the agency calls a "crisis in computing." The four-year research contract, awarded under DARPA's Ubiquitous High Performance Computing (UHPC ) program, covers work to develop GPU technologies required to build the new class of exascale supercomputers which will be 1,000-times more powerful than today's fastest supercomputers.

The team -- which also includes Cray Inc., Oak Ridge National Laboratory and six top U.S. universities -- is being funded by DARPA to address the challenge that conventional computing architectures are reaching the practical limits of energy usage and will not meet the challenges of exascale computing. The research team plans to develop new software and hardware technology to dramatically increase computing performance, programmability and reliability.

NVIDIA today announced work with Microsoft to promote NVIDIA Tesla graphics processing units (GPUs) for high performance parallel computing using the Windows HPC Server 2008 operating system.

"The coupling of GPUs and CPUs illustrates the enormous power and opportunity of multicore co-processing," said Dan Reed, corporate vice president of Extreme Computing at Microsoft. "NVIDIA's work with Microsoft and the Windows HPC Server platform, is helping enable scientists and researchers in many fields achieve supercomputer performance on diverse applications."

NVIDIA Research developed several GPU-enabled applications on the Windows HPC Server 2008 platform, such as a ray tracing application that can be used for advanced photo-realistic modeling of automobiles. Related to this, NVIDIA worked with Microsoft Research to install a large Tesla GPU computing cluster and is studying applications that are optimized for the GPU.

Supercomputer leader Cray Inc. and Microsoft Corporation today introduced the new Cray CX1 supercomputer pre-installed with Windows HPC Server 2008. With U.S. list prices starting at $25,000 to over $60,000, "ease-of-everything" features and the ability to fit into standard office environments and workflows, the new product reflects Microsoft and Cray's shared goal to drive high productivity computing farther into the mainstream in a broad array of markets including financial services, aerospace, automotive, petroleum, life sciences, government, academic and digital media.

Cray Inc. and Intel Corporation announced today they signed a multi-year agreement to advance high-performance computing (HPC) on Intel microprocessors while delivering broad new Intel and Cray technologies in future Cray server systems. The collaboration of these two industry leaders will result in HPC systems that will help solve some of the world's most complex scientific, engineering and humanitarian challenges.