SiPearl, the designer of the high computing power and low consumption microprocessor that will be the heart of European supercomputers, has entered into a partnership with Intel in order to offer a common offer dedicated to the first exascale supercomputers in Europe. This partnership will offer their European customers the possibility of combining Rhea, the high computing power and low consumption microprocessor developed by SiPearl, with Intel's Ponte Vecchio accelerator, thus creating a high performance computing node that will promote the deployment of the exascale supercomputing in Europe.

To enable this powerful combination, SiPearl plans to use and optimize for its Rhea microprocessor the open and unified programming interface, oneAPI, created by Intel. Using this single solution across the entire heterogeneous compute node, consisting of Rhea and Ponte Vecchio, will increase developer productivity and application performance.

Xiaomi today took another bold step in the exploration of future technology with its new bio-inspired quadruped robot - CyberDog. The launch of CyberDog is the culmination of Xiaomi's engineering prowess, condensed into an open source robot companion that developers can build upon.

CyberDog is Xiaomi's first foray into quadruped robotics for the open source community and developers worldwide. Robotics enthusiasts interested in CyberDog can compete or co-create with other like-minded Xiaomi Fans, together propelling the development and potential of quadruped robots.

NVIDIA today officially launched Cambridge-1, the United Kingdom's most powerful supercomputer, which will enable top scientists and healthcare experts to use the powerful combination of AI and simulation to accelerate the digital biology revolution and bolster the country's world-leading life sciences industry. Dedicated to advancing healthcare, Cambridge-1 represents a $100 million investment by NVIDIA. Its first projects with AstraZeneca, GSK, Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, King's College London and Oxford Nanopore Technologies include developing a deeper understanding of brain diseases like dementia, using AI to design new drugs and improving the accuracy of finding disease-causing variations in human genomes.

Cambridge-1 brings together decades of NVIDIA's work in accelerated computing, AI and life sciences, where NVIDIA Clara and AI frameworks are optimized to take advantage of the entire system for large-scale research. An NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD supercomputing cluster, it ranks among the world's top 50 fastest computers and is powered by 100 percent renewable energy.

NVIDIA, the maker of high-performance GPUs, has yesterday announced that the company will be investing at least 100 million US Dollars into UK's most powerful supercomputer. Back in October of 2020, NVIDIA announced that it will be building a supercomputer in Cambridge, UK, that will be called Cambridge-1. However, the original plan suggested that the investment would amount to around 40 million GBP, which is roughly 55.6 million USD. Now, it seems that NVIDIA is doubling the initial investment plan and the company now wants to invest 100 million USD, just at the initial phase, which would mean that the total budget could be much greater.

As the company is facing difficulties in the process of acquiring Arm Ltd. from Softbank, by building the most powerful supercomputer in the UK, it hopes to show its commitment to growing UK's Arm operations. And more specifically, it is building the Cambridge-1 in the same place as Arm's HQ, which is also Cambridge. In terms of technologies that will end up in this supercomputer, we are still not supplied with exact information, however, we can expect it to combine the latest CPU, GPU, and networking technologies into one powerful machine.

AMD announced that AMD EPYC 7003 Series processors will be used to power a new supercomputer for the National Supercomputing Centre (NSCC) Singapore, the national high-performance computing (HPC) resource center dedicated to supporting science and engineering computing needs.

The system will be based on the HPE Cray EX supercomputer and will use a combination of the EPYC 7763 and EPYC 75F3 processors. The supercomputer is planned to be fully operational by 2022 and is expected to have a peak theoretical performance of 10 petaFLOPS, 8x faster than NSCC's existing pool of HPC resources. Researchers will use the system to advance scientific research across biomedicine, genomics, diseases, climate, and more.

Salad Technologies is inviting PC gamers to help build the world's largest supercomputer with their idle rigs in return for digital rewards, following milestone performance metrics on its distributed computing network. The company is launching a marketplace that will lend the combined processing power of its PC gamer user base to partners' advanced computing tasks. In time, private individuals running Salad's application will compete against multimillion dollar supercomputers.

Since its founding in 2018, Salad has made "Chefs" of more than 250,000 PC gamers, leveraging the idle processing power of their hardware to validate blockchain transactions through an open-source desktop app. While away from the keyboard, Salad users share compute resources to earn rewards value for games, gift cards, and subscriptions from a library of more than 15,000 digital rewards.

NVIDIA today unveiled the world's first cloud-native, multi-tenant AI supercomputer—the next-generation NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD featuring NVIDIA BlueField -2 DPUs. Fortifying the DGX SuperPOD with BlueField-2 DPUs—data processing units that offload, accelerate and isolate users' data—provides customers with secure connections to their AI infrastructure.

The company also announced NVIDIA Base Command, which enables multiple users and IT teams to securely access, share and operate their DGX SuperPOD infrastructure. Base Command coordinates AI training and operations on DGX SuperPOD infrastructure to enable the work of teams of data scientists and developers located around the globe.

Fugaku is Japan's supercomputer that has been developed as a core system for the innovative High-Performance Computing Infrastructure (HPCI) promoted by Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT). In 2014, RIKEN and Fujitsu began joint development of Fugaku and completed delivery of all racks in May 2020. Since then, they have developed and optimized the user environment in preparation for the commencement of shared use.

In the meantime, Fugaku has claimed the world's top spot for two consecutive terms in June and November 2020 in four categories on the major high-performance computer rankings: the TOP500, HPCG, HPL-AI, as well as the Graph 500, and has been used on a trial basis under the "Program for Promoting Research on the Supercomputer Fugaku", "research projects aimed to combat COVID-19", etc. since April 2020. In these trials, two projects, "Study on Large-Scale Numerical Fluid Simulation" and "Largest Ever Meteorological Calculation" have already been selected as the ACM Gordon Bell Prize finalists. In addition, research on "Prediction and Countermeasures for Infection by Virus Contaminated Droplet in Indoor Environment" has led to changes in people's lifestyles, and Fugaku is already making steady progress toward becoming a key technological platform for science and for building Society 5.0.

Fugaku—the Arm technology-based supercomputer jointly developed by RIKEN and Fujitsu—was awarded the number one spot on the Top500 list for the second time in a row. This achievement further highlights the rapidly evolving demands of high-performance computing (HPC) that Arm technology uniquely addresses through the unmatched combination of power efficiency, performance, and scalability.

In addition to the great work RIKEN and Fujitsu have done, we're seeing more adoption for Arm-based solutions across our ecosystem. ETRI, the national computing institute of the Republic of Korea, recently announced plans to adopt the upcoming Neoverse V1 (formerly code-named Zeus) CPU design, which feature Arm Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE), for its K-AB21 system. ETRI has set a goal of 16 teraflops per CPU and 1600 teraflops per rack for AB 21 (which stands for 'Artificial Brain 21') while reducing power consumption by 60% compared to its target.

The 56th edition of the TOP500 saw the Japanese Fugaku supercomputer solidify its number one status in a list that reflects a flattening performance growth curve. Although two new systems managed to make it into the top 10, the full list recorded the smallest number of new entries since the project began in 1993.

The entry level to the list moved up to 1.32 petaflops on the High Performance Linpack (HPL) benchmark, a small increase from 1.23 petaflops recorded in the June 2020 rankings. In a similar vein, the aggregate performance of all 500 systems grew from 2.22 exaflops in June to just 2.43 exaflops on the latest list. Likewise, average concurrency per system barely increased at all, growing from 145,363 cores six months ago to 145,465 cores in the current list.

Intel today announced that Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) will leverage Intel Xeon Scalable processors in "Ruby," its latest high performance computing cluster. The Ruby system will be used for unclassified programmatic work in support of the National Nuclear Security Administration's (NNSA) stockpile stewardship mission, for researching therapeutic drugs and designer antibodies against SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, and for other open science work at LLNL.

Ruby was built in collaboration with Intel, LLNL, Supermicro and Cornelis Networks. The system consists of more than 1,500 nodes, each outfitted with Intel Xeon Scalable processors, and features 192 gigabytes of memory. Ruby will deliver 6 petaflops of peak performance and is expected to rank among the world's top 100 most powerful supercomputers.

AMD has won a contract to empower the LUMI supercomputer, designed for the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking (EuroHPC JU) in conjunction with 10 European countries. The contract will see AMD provide both the CPU and GPU innards of the LUMI, set to be populated with next-generation AMD Epyc CPUs and AMD Instinct GPUs. The supercomputer, which is set to enter operation come next year, will deliver an estimated 552 petaflop/s - higher than the world's current fastest supercomputer, Fugaku in Japan, which reaches peak performance of 513 petaflop/s - and is an Arm-powered affair.

The contract for LUMI's construction has been won by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), which will be providing an HPE Cray EX supercomputer powered by the aforementioned AMD hardware. LUMI has an investment cost set at 200 million euros, for both hardware, installation, and the foreseeable lifetime of its operation. This design win by AMD marks another big contract for the company, which was all but absent from the supercomputing space until launch, and subsequent iterations, of its Zen architecture and latest generations of Instinct HPC accelerators.

Los Alamos National Laboratory has completed the installation of a next-generation high performance computing platform, with aim to enhance its ongoing R&D efforts in support of the nation's response to COVID-19. Named Chicoma, the new platform is poised to demonstrate Hewlett Packard Enterprise's new HPE Cray EX supercomputer architecture for solving complex scientific problems.

"As extensive social and economic impacts from COVID-19 continue to grip the nation, Los Alamos scientists are actively engaged in a number of critical research efforts ranging from therapeutics design to epidemiological modeling," said Irene Qualters, Associate Laboratory Director for Simulation and Computing at Los Alamos. "High Performance Computing is playing a critical role by allowing scientists to model the complex phenomena involved in viral evolution and propagation."

NVIDIA today announced that the Italian inter-university consortium CINECA—one of the world's most important supercomputing centers—will use the company's accelerated computing platform to build the world's fastest AI supercomputer.

The new "Leonardo" system, built with Atos, is expected to deliver 10 exaflops of FP16 AI performance to enable advanced AI and HPC converged application use cases. Featuring nearly 14,000 NVIDIA Ampere architecture-based GPUs and NVIDIA Mellanox HDR 200 Gb/s InfiniBand networking, Leonardo will propel Italy as the global leader in AI and high performance computing research and innovation.

NVIDIA today announced that it is building the United Kingdom's most powerful supercomputer, which it will make available to U.K. healthcare researchers using AI to solve pressing medical challenges, including those presented by COVID-19.

Expected to come online by year end, the "Cambridge-1" supercomputer will be an NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD system capable of delivering more than 400 petaflops of AI performance and 8 petaflops of Linpack performance, which would rank it No. 29 on the latest TOP500 list of the world's most powerful supercomputers. It will also rank among the world's top 3 most energy-efficient supercomputers on the current Green500 list.

In September 2020, Eurocom will launch its newest Mobile Supercomputer, the Sky Z7 Laptop. Users are able to configure up to the highly-anticipated and incredibly powerful, user-upgradeable, NVIDIA RTX 2080 Super (Non-Max Q) desktop graphics card. The laptop will be available with a choice of 10th Generation Intel CPUs up to the i9-10900K on-board CPU. Users are able to configure and re-configure the Sky Z7 with up to 128 GB of high-speed DDR4 memory and up to a whopping 13 TB of SSD storage via user-upgradeable, easy-to-access internal components. The Eurocom Sky Z7 is a Mobile Supercomputer with easy-to-access internal hardware and battery, showcasing Eurocom's commitment to provide power users on-the-go, heavy-duty laptops that are upgradeable, and reconfigurable with the most impressive hardware today and beyond.

The Eurocom Sky Z7 Mobile Supercomputer utilizes the Z490 Chipset and LGA 1200 socket technology configurable with the most powerful desktop GPUs available today, up to the supercharged NVIDIA RTX 2080 Super (Non-Max Q) desktop GPU, which boasts a whopping 3072 CUDA cores with 8 GB GDDR6 video memory and up to 1815 MHz boost clock. The RTX 2080 Super is among the most advanced and sought after desktop GPUs available today due to its unmatched performance when running AAA games and other GPU-intensive applications.

The University of Florida and NVIDIA Tuesday unveiled a plan to build the world's fastest AI supercomputer in academia, delivering 700 petaflops of AI performance. The effort is anchored by a $50 million gift: $25 million from alumnus and NVIDIA co-founder Chris Malachowsky and $25 million in hardware, software, training and services from NVIDIA.

"We've created a replicable, powerful model of public-private cooperation for everyone's benefit," said Malachowsky, who serves as an NVIDIA Fellow, in an online event featuring leaders from both the UF and NVIDIA. UF will invest an additional $20 million to create an AI-centric supercomputing and data center.

Microsoft has held a Build 2020 conference for developers from all over the world, and they live-streamed it online. Among some of the announcements, Microsoft has announced a new supercomputer dedicated to the OpenAI company, which works on building Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). The new supercomputer is a part of Microsoft's Azure cloud infrastructure and it will allow OpenAI developers to train very large scale machine learning models in the cloud. The supercomputer is said to be the fifth most powerful supercomputer in the world with specifications of "more than 285,000 CPU cores, 10,000 GPUs and 400 gigabits per second of network connectivity for each GPU server."

Specific information wasn't announced and we don't know what CPUs and GPUs go into this machine, but we can speculate that the latest Nvidia A100 "Ampere" GPU could be used. The company hasn't yet submitted its entry to the Top500 website, so we can't keep track of the FLOPs count and see what power it holds.

Fujitsu has today officially completed the delivery of the Fugaku supercomputer to the Riken scientific research institute of Japan. This is a big accomplishment as the current COVID-19 pandemic has delayed many happenings in the industry. However, Fujitsu managed to play around that and deliver the supercomputer on time. The last of 400 racks needed for the Fugaku supercomputer was delivered today, on May 13th, as it was originally planned. The supercomputer is supposed to be fully operational starting on the physical year of 2021, where the installation and setup will be done before.

As a reminder, the Fugaku is an Arm-based supercomputer consisting out of 150 thousand A64FX CPUs. These CPUs are custom made processors by Fujitsu based on Arm v8.2 ISA, and they feature 48 cores built on TSMC 7 nm node and running above 2 GHz. Packing 8.786 billion transistors, this monster chips use HBM2 memory instead of a regular DDR memory interface. Recently, a prototype of the Fugaku supercomputer was submitted to the Top500 supercomputer list and it came on top for being the most energy-efficient of all, meaning that it will be as energy efficient as it will be fast. Speculations are that it will have around 400 PetaFlops of general compute power for Dual-Precision workloads, however, for the specific artificial intelligence applications, it should achieve ExaFLOP performance target.

This one here is another shot in the arm when it comes to faith in humanity. Folding@Home, the distributed computing project where users can donate their spare CPU and GPU cycles for a given cause, has hit an absolute bonkers milestone. According to Greg Bowman, Director of Folding@home, the network has reached a peak compute power amounting to some 470 petaFLOPS - more than double that of the world's current supercomputing record holder, the Summit supercomputer, which dishes out 200 peak petaFLOPS. Folding@Home's 470 Petaflops means users donating their spare cycles are delivering more computing power than that which is available in the world's top 7 supercomputers combined.

After some slight service outages where users weren't getting any work units due to the increased number of donors over the last few days, the computing service now seems to be running at full steam ahead. Remember that you can select the causes for which you are donating your computing power: whether cancer, Alzheimer's, Huntington, or Parkinson's disease, as well as some other non-selectable projects.

AMD has scored yet another design win for usage of its high-performance EPYC processors in the Cray Shasta supercomputer. The Cray Shasta will be deployed in the US Navy's Department of Defense Supercomputing Resource Center (DSRC) as part of the High Performance Computing Modernization Program. The peak theoretical computing capability of 12.8 PetaFLOPS, or 12.8 quadrillion floating point operations per second supercomputer will be built with 290,304 AMD EPYC (Rome) processor cores and 112 NVIDIA Volta V100 General-Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs). The system will also feature 590 total terabytes (TB) of memory and 14 petabytes (PB) of usable storage, including 1 PB of NVMe-based solid state storage. Cray's Slingshot network will make sure all those components talk to each other at a rate of 200 Gigabits per second.

Navy DSRC supercomputers support climate, weather, and ocean modeling by NMOC, which assists U.S. Navy meteorologists and oceanographers in predicting environmental conditions that may affect the Navy fleet. Among other scientific endeavors, the new supercomputer will be used to enhance weather forecasting models; ultimately, this improves the accuracy of hurricane intensity and track forecasts. The system is expected to be online by early fiscal year 2021.

The UK government has set aside a budget of 1.2 billion GBP, which is roughly around 1.56 billion US Dollars. With this budget, the UK government plans to install the world's most powerful supercomputer used for weather forecasting in the year 2022. Previously, the UK government used three Cray XC40 supercomputers that are capable of achieving a maximum of 14 PetaFLOPs at its peak performance. The future system plans to take that number and make it look tiny. With plans to make it 20 times more powerful than the current machine, we can estimate that the future supercomputer will have above 200 PetaFLOPs of computing performance.

The supercomputer deployment will follow a series of cycles, where one is happening in 2022 and that supercomputer will be six times more powerful than the current solution. To get to that 20 times improvement, the supercomputer will get an upgrade over the next five years' time. While we do not know what will power the new machine, it will almost definitely be a CPU plus multi-GPU node configuration, as GPUs have gained a lot of traction in weather prediction models lately.

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.

Höchstleistungsrechenzentrum (HLRS, or High-Performance Computing Center), based in Stuttgart Germany, is building a new cluster supercomputer powered by 10,000 AMD Zen 2 "Rome" 64-core processors, making up 640,000 cores. Called "Hawk," the supercomputer will be HLRS' flagship product, and will open its doors to business in 2019. The slide-deck for Hawk makes a fascinating disclosure about the processors it's based on.

Apparently, each of the 64-core "Rome" EPYC processors has a guaranteed clock-speed of 2.35 GHz. This would mean at maximum load (with all cores loaded 100%), the processor can manage to run at 2.35 GHz. This is important, because the supercomputer's advertised throughput is calculated on this basis, and clients draw up SLAs on throughput. The advertised peak throughput for the whole system is 24.06 petaFLOP/s, although the company is yet to put out nominal/guaranteed performance numbers (which it will only after first-hand testing). The system features 665 TB of RAM, and 26,000 TB of storage.

Fujitsu today announces that its AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure (ABCI) system has placed 5th in the world, and 1st in Japan, in the TOP500 international performance ranking of supercomputers. ABCI has also taken 8th place in the world in Green500, which ranks outstanding energy saving performance. Fujitsu developed ABCI, Japan's fastest open AI infrastructure featuring a large-scale, power-saving cloud platform geared toward AI processing, based on a tender issued by the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST).

These rankings were announced on June 25 (Japan time) at ISC 2018, an international conference on high performance computing (HPC) held in Germany. TOP500 evaluates and ranks the top 500 computer systems in the world by computational processing speed. Green500 ranks the TOP500-listed supercomputers to offer excellent examples of power consumption performance.