What Caught My Attention at SC08

By Michael Feldman

November 21, 2008

A show the size of the Supercomputing Conference is difficult to swallow whole. With hundreds of exhibitors and conference activities, it’s virtually impossible to get a balanced perspective. Despite being here for a full week, I’m sure I’ll come away feeling I missed most of the conference. That said, here are a few areas that caught my attention at SC08.

The most compelling “big iron” story of the conference was the new “Jaguar” Cray XT at Oak Ridge. The 1.64 (peak) petaflop machine is now the largest general-purpose supercomputer in the world. Although ORNL missed the Linpack submission to beat out Roadrunner for the number one spot on the TOP500, a real live application that executed on Jaguar captured this year’s Gordon Bell Prize for peak performance. The winning submission was from a team of ORNL researchers that achieved 1.35 petaflops with a simulation of superconductors. Our Q&A with Doug Kothe gives you some idea of the applications that lie ahead for the machine.

At the other end of the scale were the plethora of personal supercomputers being exhibited at SC08. Leading that charge was NVIDIA, who managed to line up all vendors, great and small, and convinced them to incorporate multiple Tesla C1060 GPU accelerator cards into desktop and deskside machines. Tesla-equipped personal systems will soon be offered by Dell, Lenovo, BOXX, Velocity Micro, Penguin Computing, ASUS and a handful of others. In 2009 you’ll be able to buy  a 4 (single precision) teraflop workstation for around $10K. Moving a little further up the food chain, Cray will also be offering Tesla-accelerated machines in their new deskside CX1 system.

A GPGPU software ecosystem is rapidly developing to unleash all this GPU goodness. Although CUDA, and Brook+ are available now for GPU programming, other GPU-enabling software is starting to appear. OpenCL, a hardware agnostic low-level interface for GPU computing, should become available by early 2009, with vendor implementations to follow. If you want to dig a little deeper into OpenCL, check out Friday’s article by RapidMind’s Michael McCool.

Even better news is that higher level GPU-friendly software development environments are starting to appear. While RapidMind has had this level of support for a couple of years, French-based CAPS enterprise now offers a C and Fortran development environment for NVIDIA and AMD GPUs. Newcomer AccelerEyes has developed Jacket, a GPU engine for MATLAB that wraps CUDA (for GPU computing) and OpenGL (for visualization) into an extension of the MATLAB language. Along those same lines, Wolfram Research demonstrated a CUDA-accelerated version of Mathematica to tap into NVIDIA GPUs. Finally, PGI announced it has teamed with AMD to develop compiler technology that will generate GPU code from standard C and Fortran. The first version will target AMD’s FireStream hardware, but presumably PGI is also thinking hard about an NVIDIA Tesla implementation*.

Extracting parallelism from vanilla C and Fortran code is also the model that startup Convey Computer is employing for its CPU-FPGA hybrid server — a product I wrote about on Monday. The Convey offering is the brainchild of HPC veteran (and this year’s Seymour Cray Award winner) Steve Wallach, and is packed with cleverness from top to bottom. Gauging by the booth traffic at the company’s booth, the Convey launch garnered quite a bit of interest from conference attendees. If I were in product development at Convey, I’d consider adding a deskside model for software developers.

Outside of accelerator-land, the most widely talked about processor at SC08 — the Intel Nehalem — never actually made a public appearance at the show. These chips are presumably in production right now and the 2P server versions should start showing up as early as Q1 2009. The 4P Nehalems are expected later in the year — maybe much later. Since the Xeons now dominate the HPC market (even in the TOP500), every server and workstation HPC vendor will probably be scrambling to get new Nehalem-based boxes to market as quickly as possible.

NAND flash memory and the associated Solid State Disk (SSD) products seemed much more visible at SC08 compared to years past. Increased NAND density and performance, along with dropping prices, are making NAND memory a very attractive storage layer between main DRAM and magnetic disks. On the show floor, Texas Memory Systems, Solid Access Technologies, Violin Memory, BiTMICRO Networks, and Fusion-io all had a slightly different stories to tell about their offerings. And while I’m not yet conversant in NAND technology, in talking with Fusion-io CTO David Flynn it became apparent that using these devices just as turbo-charged disks is probably not the way to go. I plan to follow this space more closely in 2009 as more products come to market.

[*UPDATE — Nov. 24. — PGI is already in the process of developing an NVIDIA Tesla implementation and was demonstrating a pre-release version in their booth at SC08.]

Subscribe to HPCwire's Weekly Update!

Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industry updates delivered to you every week!

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing power it brings to artificial intelligence.  Nvidia's DGX Read more…

Call for Participation in Workshop on Potential NSF CISE Quantum Initiative

March 26, 2024

Editor’s Note: Next month there will be a workshop to discuss what a quantum initiative led by NSF’s Computer, Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate could entail. The details are posted below in a Ca Read more…

Waseda U. Researchers Reports New Quantum Algorithm for Speeding Optimization

March 25, 2024

Optimization problems cover a wide range of applications and are often cited as good candidates for quantum computing. However, the execution time for constrained combinatorial optimization applications on quantum device Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at the network layer threatens to make bigger and brawnier pro Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HBM3E memory as well as the the ability to train 1 trillion pa Read more…

Nvidia Appoints Andy Grant as EMEA Director of Supercomputing, Higher Education, and AI

March 22, 2024

Nvidia recently appointed Andy Grant as Director, Supercomputing, Higher Education, and AI for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). With over 25 years of high-performance computing (HPC) experience, Grant brings a Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing po Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HB Read more…

Nvidia Looks to Accelerate GenAI Adoption with NIM

March 19, 2024

Today at the GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia launched a new offering aimed at helping customers quickly deploy their generative AI applications in a secure, s Read more…

The Generative AI Future Is Now, Nvidia’s Huang Says

March 19, 2024

We are in the early days of a transformative shift in how business gets done thanks to the advent of generative AI, according to Nvidia CEO and cofounder Jensen Read more…

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, codenamed Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from Read more…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. Wh Read more…

Houston We Have a Solution: Addressing the HPC and Tech Talent Gap

March 15, 2024

Generations of Houstonian teachers, counselors, and parents have either worked in the aerospace industry or know people who do - the prospect of entering the fi Read more…

Alibaba Shuts Down its Quantum Computing Effort

November 30, 2023

In case you missed it, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba has shut down its quantum computing research effort. It’s not entirely clear what drove the change. Read more…

Nvidia H100: Are 550,000 GPUs Enough for This Year?

August 17, 2023

The GPU Squeeze continues to place a premium on Nvidia H100 GPUs. In a recent Financial Times article, Nvidia reports that it expects to ship 550,000 of its lat Read more…

Shutterstock 1285747942

AMD’s Horsepower-packed MI300X GPU Beats Nvidia’s Upcoming H200

December 7, 2023

AMD and Nvidia are locked in an AI performance battle – much like the gaming GPU performance clash the companies have waged for decades. AMD has claimed it Read more…

DoD Takes a Long View of Quantum Computing

December 19, 2023

Given the large sums tied to expensive weapon systems – think $100-million-plus per F-35 fighter – it’s easy to forget the U.S. Department of Defense is a Read more…

Synopsys Eats Ansys: Does HPC Get Indigestion?

February 8, 2024

Recently, it was announced that Synopsys is buying HPC tool developer Ansys. Started in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1970 as Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. (SASI) by John Swanson (and eventually renamed), Ansys serves the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering)/multiphysics engineering simulation market. Read more…

Choosing the Right GPU for LLM Inference and Training

December 11, 2023

Accelerating the training and inference processes of deep learning models is crucial for unleashing their true potential and NVIDIA GPUs have emerged as a game- Read more…

Intel’s Server and PC Chip Development Will Blur After 2025

January 15, 2024

Intel's dealing with much more than chip rivals breathing down its neck; it is simultaneously integrating a bevy of new technologies such as chiplets, artificia Read more…

Baidu Exits Quantum, Closely Following Alibaba’s Earlier Move

January 5, 2024

Reuters reported this week that Baidu, China’s giant e-commerce and services provider, is exiting the quantum computing development arena. Reuters reported � Read more…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

Comparing NVIDIA A100 and NVIDIA L40S: Which GPU is Ideal for AI and Graphics-Intensive Workloads?

October 30, 2023

With long lead times for the NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs, many organizations are looking at the new NVIDIA L40S GPU, which it’s a new GPU optimized for AI and g Read more…

Shutterstock 1179408610

Google Addresses the Mysteries of Its Hypercomputer 

December 28, 2023

When Google launched its Hypercomputer earlier this month (December 2023), the first reaction was, "Say what?" It turns out that the Hypercomputer is Google's t Read more…

AMD MI3000A

How AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat

October 5, 2023

When discussing GenAI, the term "GPU" almost always enters the conversation and the topic often moves toward performance and access. Interestingly, the word "GPU" is assumed to mean "Nvidia" products. (As an aside, the popular Nvidia hardware used in GenAI are not technically... Read more…

Shutterstock 1606064203

Meta’s Zuckerberg Puts Its AI Future in the Hands of 600,000 GPUs

January 25, 2024

In under two minutes, Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, laid out the company's AI plans, which included a plan to build an artificial intelligence system with the eq Read more…

Google Introduces ‘Hypercomputer’ to Its AI Infrastructure

December 11, 2023

Google ran out of monikers to describe its new AI system released on December 7. Supercomputer perhaps wasn't an apt description, so it settled on Hypercomputer Read more…

China Is All In on a RISC-V Future

January 8, 2024

The state of RISC-V in China was discussed in a recent report released by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The report, entitled "E Read more…

Intel Won’t Have a Xeon Max Chip with New Emerald Rapids CPU

December 14, 2023

As expected, Intel officially announced its 5th generation Xeon server chips codenamed Emerald Rapids at an event in New York City, where the focus was really o Read more…

IBM Quantum Summit: Two New QPUs, Upgraded Qiskit, 10-year Roadmap and More

December 4, 2023

IBM kicks off its annual Quantum Summit today and will announce a broad range of advances including its much-anticipated 1121-qubit Condor QPU, a smaller 133-qu Read more…

  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire