We previously covered in more depth the fact that the US was gearing up to overtake China's Sunway TaihuLight, then the world's fastest supercomputer, with its Summit machine, built in collaboration between IBM (with its water-cooled Power Systems AC922 nodes with 24-core processors and 96 processing threads) and NVIDIA (GV100 GPUs).

Now, this US dream has finally come to pass, and in a big way - the Summit delivers more than double the performance of China's posterchild, coming in at 200 PetaFLOPs of computing power. Summit boasts of 27,648 Volta Tensor Core GPUs and 9,216 CPUs within its 5,600 square feet. The Summit supercomputer consumes 15 MW of power (the site where it's deployed is able to deliver up to 20 MW), which is on-par with China's Sunway - but remember, it more than doubles the peak PetaFlops from 93 to 200. A good step in the battle for supercomputer supremacy, but China still has an increasing foothold in the number of systems it has employed and registered with the TOP500.

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."

Eni has launched its new HPC4 supercomputer, at its Green Data Center in Ferrera Erbognone, 60 km away from Milan. HPC4 quadruples the Company's computing power and makes it the world's most powerful industrial system. HPC4 has a peak performance of 18.6 Petaflops which, combined with the supercomputing system already in operation (HPC3), increases Eni's computational peak capacity to 22.4 Petaflops.

According to the latest official Top 500 supercomputers list published last November (the next list is due to be published in June 2018), Eni's HPC4 is the only non-governmental and non-institutional system ranking among the top ten most powerful systems in the world. Eni's Green Data Center has been designed as a single IT Infrastructure to host all of HPC's architecture and all the other Business applications.

China has been increasingly - and steadily - gaining relevance in the supercomputing world, with most of the top-500 entries being controlled by that country. In fact, China can boast of having the number one supercomputer in the world, the Sunway TaihuLight, which can deliver 93 PetaFLOPS of computing power - just 3x more computational power than the second most powerful machine, China's own Tianhe-2). However, supercomputing, and the amount of money that's earned by selling processing slices of these supercomputers for private or state contractors, i a very attractive pull - especially considering the increasingly more expensive computational needs of the modern world.

The Summit is to be the United State's call to fame in that regard, bringing the country back to number one in raw, top-of-the-line single-machine supercomputing power. Summit is promising to more than double the PetaFLOPS of China's TaihuLight, to over 200 PetaFLOPs. That amounts to around 11x more processing grunt than its predecessor, the Titan, in a much smaller footprint - the Titan's 18,688 processing nodes will be condensed to just ~4,600 nodes on the Summit, with each node achieving around 40 TeraFLOPS of computing power. The hardware? IBM and NVIDIA, married in water-cooled nodes with the powerful GV100 accelerator that's still eluding us enthusiasts - but that's a question for another day.

NVIDIA at the Supercomputing 2017 conference announced a major upgrade of its new SaturnV AI supercomputer, which when complete, the company claims, will be not just one of the world's top-10 AI supercomputers in terms of raw compute power; but will also the world's most energy-efficient. The SaturnV will be a cluster supercomputer with 660 NVIDIA DGX-1 nodes. Each such node packs eight NVIDIA GV100 GPUs, which takes the machine's total GPU count to a staggering 5,280 (that's GPUs, not CUDA cores). They add up to an FP16 performance that's scraping the ExaFLOP (1,000-petaFLOP or 10^18 FLOP/s) barrier; while its FP64 (double-precision) compute performance nears 40 petaFLOP/s (40,000 TFLOP/s).

SaturnV should beat Summit, a supercomputer being co-developed by NVIDIA and IBM, which in turn should unseat Sunway TaihuLight, that's currently the world's fastest supercomputer. This feat gains prominence as NVIDIA SaturnV and NVIDIA+IBM Summit are both machines built by the American private-sector, which are trying to beat a supercomputing leader backed by the mighty Chinese exchequer. The other claim to fame of SaturnV is its energy-efficiency. Before its upgrade, SaturnV achieved an energy-efficiency of a staggering 15.1 GFLOP/s per Watt, which was already the fourth "greenest." NVIDIA expects the upgraded SaturnV to take the number-one spot.

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.

NVIDIA today unveiled the NVIDIA DGX-1, the world's first deep learning supercomputer to meet the unlimited computing demands of artificial intelligence. The NVIDIA DGX-1 is the first system designed specifically for deep learning -- it comes fully integrated with hardware, deep learning software and development tools for quick, easy deployment. It is a turnkey system that contains a new generation of GPU accelerators, delivering the equivalent throughput of 250 x86 servers.

The DGX-1 deep learning system enables researchers and data scientists to easily harness the power of GPU-accelerated computing to create a new class of intelligent machines that learn, see and perceive the world as humans do. It delivers unprecedented levels of computing power to drive next-generation AI applications, allowing researchers to dramatically reduce the time to train larger, more sophisticated deep neural networks.

AMD today announced that researchers at the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) will harness the AMD FirePro S9300 x2 Server GPU, the world's fastest single-precision GPU accelerator, to analyze extraordinary amounts of data to help create a new, very detailed 3D map of the largest volume of the Universe ever observed. Rather than using traditional dish-shaped telescopes, CHIME consists of four 100-metre-long cylindrical reflectors which cover an area larger than five professional hockey rinks and gathers signals for the critical computational analyses supplied by the AMD FirePro S9300 x2 GPU cluster.

The CHIME project was created to investigate the discovery that the expansion of the Universe is speeding up rather than slowing down. Using consumer technologies similar to those found in common radio receivers, the telescope collects radio waves that have travelled through space for up to 11 billion years and feeds them into a massive supercomputer powered by a series of AMD FirePro S9300 x2 GPUs. The intense number crunching required to map the Universe's expansion in this way was previously cost-prohibitive, but is now being enabled by AMD FirePro GPUs. The anticipated results will help create a highly-detailed map showing the intensity of the hydrogen radiation from billions of galaxies, which will help scientists understand the accelerating expansion of the Universe.

NVIDIA announced the Drive PX 2, the first in-car AI deep-learning device. This lunchbox sized "mobile supercomputer" embeds up to twelve CPU cores, a "Pascal" GPU built on the 16 nm FinFET process, 6 TFLOP/s of raw compute power, and 24 deep-learning TOps of compute power usable for deep-learning applications; the chips are liquid-cooled, draw 250W in all, and give the car a very powerful deep-learning device for self-driving cars. The device itself will be offered to car manufacturers to redesign and co-develop self-driving cars with.The press-release follows.

AMD today announced the new AMD FirePro S9170 server GPU, the world's first and fastest 32GB single-GPU server card for DGEMM heavy double-precision workloads, with support for OpenCL 2.0. Based on the second-generation AMD Graphics Core Next (GCN) GPU architecture, this new addition to the AMD FirePro server GPU family is capable of delivering up to 5.24 TFLOPS of peak single precision compute performance while enabling full throughput double precision performance, providing up to 2.62 TFLOPS of peak double precision performance. Designed with compute-intensive workflows in mind, the AMD FirePro S9170 server GPU is ideal for data center managers who oversee clusters within academic or government bodies, oil and gas industries, or deep neural network compute cluster development.

"AMD is recognized as an HPC industry innovator as the graphics provider with the top spot on the November 2014 Green500 List. Today the best GPU for compute just got better with the introduction of the AMD FirePro S9170 server GPU to complement AMD's impressive array of server graphics offerings for high performance compute environments," said Sean Burke, corporate vice president and general manager, AMD Professional Graphics group. "The AMD FirePro S9170 server GPU can accelerate complex workloads in scientific computing, data analytics, or seismic processing, wielding an industry-leading 32GB of memory. We designed the new offering for supercomputers to achieve massive compute performance while maximizing available power budgets."

AMD today unveiled innovation in heterogeneous high performance computing (HPC) by delivering more than 1.5 petaFLOPS of AMD FirePro S9150 server GPU performance for the Next Generation Sequencing Centre (NGSC) at the Centre of New Technologies, University of Warsaw in support of bioinformatics research related to next generation sequencing (NGS) studies. The new ORION cluster features 150 Dell PowerEdge R730 servers with two AMD FirePro S9150 server GPUs, for a total GPU peak of 1.52 petaFLOPS single precision and 0.76 petaFLOPS double precision performance. The energy-efficient cluster enables high speed and efficient calculations for genomic data, applicable to a range of genomics and bioinformatics studies, using a fast and power efficient OpenCL implementation for research applications.

"We're committed to building our HPC leadership position in the industry as a foremost provider of computing applications, tools and technologies," said Sean Burke, corporate vice-president and general manager, AMD Professional Graphics. "This installation reaffirms AMD's leading role in HPC with the implementation of the AMD FirePro S9150 server GPUs in this 1.5 petaFLOPS supercomputer cluster. AMD and Dell are enabling OpenCL applications for critical science research usage for this cluster. AMD is proud to collaborate with Dell and NGSC to support such important life science and computer science research."

IBM, in collaboration with NVIDIA and Mellanox, today announced the establishment of a POWER Acceleration and Design Center in Montpellier, France to advance the development of data-intensive research, industrial, and commercial applications. Born out of the collaborative spirit fostered by the OpenPOWER Foundation - a community co-founded in part by IBM, NVIDIA and Mellanox supporting open development on top of the POWER architecture - the new Center provides commercial and open-source software developers with technical assistance to enable them to develop high performance computing (HPC) applications.

Technical experts from IBM, NVIDIA and Mellanox will help developers take advantage of OpenPOWER systems leveraging IBM's open and licensable POWER architecture with the NVIDIA Tesla Accelerated Computing Platform and Mellanox InfiniBand networking solutions. These are the class of systems developed collaboratively with the U.S. Department of Energy for the next generation Sierra and Summit supercomputers and to be used by the United Kingdom's Science and Technology Facilities Council's Hartree Centre for big data research.

AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced that for the third straight year it was awarded research grants for development of critical technologies needed for extreme-scale computing in conjunction with projects associated with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Extreme-Scale Computing Research and Development Program, known as "FastForward 2."

The two DOE awards, totaling more than $32 million, will fund research focused on exascale applications for AMD Accelerated Processing Units (APUs) based on the open-standard Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA), as well as future memory systems to power a generation of exascale supercomputers capable of delivering 30-60 times more performance than today's fastest supercomputers.

TSMC today announced its 16-nanometer FinFET Plus (16FF+) process is now in risk production. This enhanced version of TSMC's 16FF process operates 40% faster than the company's planar 20-nanometer system-on-chip (20SoC) process, or consumes 50% less power at the same speed. It offers customers a new level of performance and power optimization targeted at the next generation of high-end mobile, computing, networking, and consumer applications.

TSMC's 16nm process offers an extended scaling of advanced SoC designs and is verified to reach speeds of 2.3GHz with ARM's "big" Cortex-A57 in high-speed applications while consuming as little as 75mW with the "LITTLE" Cortex-A53 in low-power applications. It is making excellent progress in yield learning, and has achieved the best technology maturity at the same corresponding stage as compared to all TSMC's previous nodes.

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.

NVIDIA's new Tegra K1 mobile processor will help self-driving cars advance from the realm of research into the mass market with its automotive-grade version of the same GPU that powers the world's 10 most energy-efficient supercomputers. The first mobile processor to bring advanced computational capabilities to the car, the NVIDIA Tegra K1 runs a variety of auto applications that had previously not been possible with such low power consumption.

Tegra K1 features a quad-core CPU and a 192-core GPU using the NVIDIA Kepler architecture, the basis for NVIDIA's range of powerful GPUs -- including the processors that are used in the top 10 systems featured in the latest Green500 list of the world's most energy-efficient supercomputers. Tegra K1 will drive camera-based, advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) -- such as pedestrian detection, blind-spot monitoring, lane-departure warning and street sign recognition -- and can also monitor driver alertness via a dashboard-mounted camera.

The National Cheng Kung University (NCKU) Supercomputing Research Center (RSC) has built the world's first switchless cluster computer. Known as the "CK-Star", this computer connects eight computers without switch control, thus breaking Intel's performance record. Together with the computer systems provided by Acer, the CK-Star is jointly built by NCKU RSC Director Dr. Chi-Chuan Hwang and Dr. Yuefan Deng of Mainland China's National Supercomputing Center in Jinan (NSCCJN), who is also a Distinguished Professor at the State University of New York (SUNY).

NCKU RSC Director Dr. Chi-Chuan Hwang added that CK-Star is the most unique switchless cluster supercomputer compared to traditional cluster supercomputer which requires switch control to control interaction between nodes. He explained that the weakness of the traditional one is that switches will become performance bottlenecks when the number of nodes is large. Besides, switches also consume large amount of power, estimated to be 50% of the total power consumption. With the introduction of the CK-Star which allows the unrestricted expansion of supercomputers, these problems can be overcome.

Intel Corporation unveiled innovations in HPC and announced new software tools that will help propel businesses and researchers to generate greater insights from their data and solve their most vital business and scientific challenges.

"In the last decade, the high-performance computing community has created a vision of a parallel universe where the most vexing problems of society, industry, government and research are solved through modernized applications," said Raj Hazra, Intel vice president and general manager of the Technical Computing Group. "Intel technology has helped HPC evolve from a technology reserved for an elite few to an essential and broadly available tool for discovery. The solutions we enable for ecosystem partners for the second half of this decade will drive the next level of insight from HPC. Innovations will include scale through standards, performance through application modernization, efficiency through integration and innovation through customized solutions."

AMD today announced that it was selected for an award of $3.1 million for a research project associated with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Extreme-Scale Computing Research and Development Program, known as "DesignForward." The DOE award is an expansion of work started as part of another two-year award AMD received in 2012 called "FastForward." The FastForward award aims to accelerate the research and development of processor and memory technologies needed to support extreme-scale computing. The DesignForward award supports the research of the interconnect architectures and technologies needed to support the data transfer capabilities in extreme-scale computing environments.

DesignForward is a jointly funded collaboration between the DOE Office of Science and the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) to accelerate the research and development of critical technologies needed for extreme-scale computing, on the path toward Exascale computing. Exascale supercomputers are expected to be capable of performing computation hundreds of times faster than today's fastest computers, with only slightly higher power utilization.

NVIDIA and IBM today announced plans to collaborate on GPU-accelerated versions of IBM's wide portfolio of enterprise software applications on IBM Power Systems. The move marks the first time that GPU accelerator technology will move beyond the realm of supercomputing and into the heart of enterprise-scale data centers. The collaboration aims to enable IBM customers to more rapidly process, secure and analyze massive volumes of streaming data.

"Companies are looking for new and more efficient ways to drive business value from Big Data and analytics," said Tom Rosamilia, senior vice president, IBM Systems & Technology Group and Integrated Supply Chain. "The combination of IBM and NVIDIA processor technologies can provide clients with an advanced and efficient foundation to achieve this goal."

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."

A system built with thousands of Intel processors and co-processors was just named the most powerful supercomputer in the world in the 41st edition of the Top500 list of supercomputers. The system, known as "Milky Way 2," includes 48,000 Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors and 32,000 Intel Xeon processors and operates at a peak performance of 54.9 PFlops (54.9 quadrillion floating point operations per second) -- more than twice the performance of the top rated system from the last edition of the Top500 list in November 2012. This is the first exclusively Intel-based system to take the top spot on the list since 1997.

Intel also announced the expansion of the Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors portfolio and revealed details of the second generation of Intel Xeon Phi products code named "Knights Landing." The new products and technologies will continue to radically increase the energy efficiency and performance of supercomputers worldwide.