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Microsoft and OpenAI are reportedly planning to build a $100 billion data center and supercomputer that could lead to the creation of AIs far more capable than anything possible today.Power hungry: Soon after investing its first $1 billion into OpenAI in 2019, Microsoft set out to solve one of the biggest challenges facing the AI firm: the need for a lot of processing power to train and run its generative AIs. That led to the creation of a custom supercomputer at Microsoft data centers in Iowa.“These supercomputing systems are really the lifeblood of our research,” Katie Mayer, who manages the...

Microsoft Corp. plans to build a supercomputer with millions of processors to support OpenAI’s research, The Information reported today. The system will be geared toward running artificial intelligence workloads. Reportedly codenamed Stargate by Microsoft executives, the supercomputer is believed to be part of a broader initiative that is also set to see the company build several other AI clusters. The project is expected to cost as much as $100 billion. OpenAI already uses Microsoft infrastructure to train its AI models. In 2020, the cloud computing and software giant disclosed that it had built an Azure-hosted supercomputer with 10,000 graphics cards...

For years, x86 processors and Linux have ruled supercomputing. Linux still runs 500 out of the TOP500 supercomputers in the world. For just about as long, x86 CPUs have dominated supercomputers -- until now. On June 22, Japan's Fugaku supercomputer, powered by Fujitsu's 48-core A64FX SoC and running Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), became the first ARM-powered supercomputer to be dubbed the fastest computer in the world.  In winning over the others, it wasn't even close. Fugaku turned in a High-Performance Linpack (HPL) result of 415.5 petaflops, besting the second-place IBM Summit system by a factor of 2.8x. Fujitsu has been...

[Snip]...The visualization below, inspired by the recent 50th anniversary of Moore’s law, tells the story of the trillion fold increase in computing performance we’ve witnessed over the past sixty years. That’s impressive enough, but some of the other finds are downright astounding. The Apollo guidance computer that took early astronauts to the moon, for instance, has the processing power of 2 Nintendo Entertainment Systems, while the Cray-2 supercomputer from 1985—the fastest machine in the world for its time—roughly measures up to an iPhone 4.

In a move that could have broad implications for the high-performance computing (HPC) market, Intel and Cray have announced a broad collaboration that will see engineers from the two companies work together on future products and projects.With the first Intel-Cray products appearing in the 2010-2011 timeframe, it's clear that three Intel technologies have caught Cray's eye: the native 32nm Sandy Bridge microarchitecture, the QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) scheme, and the forthcoming discrete, x86-based graphics product, codenamed Larrabee. Cray will plug all of these components into its SeaStar interconnect fabric, and when combined with Cray Linux they'll make for an HPC and...

Cray Supercomputer at Sandia Helps Researchers Discover Origin of Mysterious Glass Found in King Tut's Tomb Released : Tuesday, July 31, 2007 7:26 AM Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (NASDAQ: CRAY) today announced that researchers running simulations on the Cray supercomputer at Sandia National Laboratories have re-created what could have happened 29 million years ago when an asteroid explosion turned Saharan sand into glass. The greenish natural glass, which can still be found scattered across remote stretches of the desert, was used by an artisan in ancient Egypt to carve a scarab that decorates one of the bejeweled breastplates buried...

IBM ASIC Technology Helps Power New Cray X1 Supercomputer 2 Jan 2003, 09:07am ET - - - - - 800 IBM ASIC Chips Feature Total Gate Count of 7.5 Billion IBM today announced that it is the sole application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) technology provider for the new Cray (NASDAQ: CRAY) X1 supercomputer, which is now being shipped to customers. The Cray supercomputer contains 800 IBM ASIC chips, designed by Cray exclusively for the X1 and manufactured by IBM. The chips feature gate counts as high as 14.2 million, an average gate count of about 9.5 million, and a...

—Giant supercomputer to use more than 10,000 AMD Opteron processors for high-level simulations— SUNNYVALE, CA -- October 21, 2002 --AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced the upcoming AMD Opteron™ processor based on Hammer technology is planned to power a supercomputer developed by Cray, Inc. intended for nuclear weapon engineering simulations by the Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M. Cray has been selected to develop the massive parallel processing supercomputer, code-named “Red Storm.” The supercomputer is expected to be at least seven times more powerful than Sandia’s current “ASCI Red” supercomputer on Sandia’s 3D, full-physics simulation codes. The...

Back in 1978 I (i.e., the narrator Mr. Darling) worked for Cray Research, which made what was at the time the world’s fastest computer, the Cray-1. I thought it would be interesting to compare the Cray-1 with the latest model of iPhone, the iPhone 13. (this is a 2022 video) ItemUnisCray 1iPhone 13FactorWeightOunces176,000629,300Price (2022 $)202238,000,0001,00038,000SpeedMFLOPS16015,800,000100,000MemoryMB160512,00060,000Power consumptionkW115LiOn 20 hours Cooling Freon refrAir

Extreme global warming is likely to wipe out all mammals – including humans – in 250 million years, according to a brand new first-ever scientific study. It has been reported that temperatures on Earth could skyrocket to around 70C (185F) which would ultimately transform the planet from what we know it to be like now, into a ‘hostile environment devoid of food and water’, the researcher who conducted this study has warned everyone. If this study is to come true, then it would mean Earth’s temperature would simply become too hot for mammals to live and would no longer be...

A closer look at the Bradykinin hypothesis arlier this summer, the Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee set about crunching data on more than 40,000 genes from 17,000 genetic samples in an effort to better understand Covid-19. Summit is the second-fastest computer in the world, but the process — which involved analyzing 2.5 billion genetic combinations — still took more than a week. When Summit was done, researchers analyzed the results. It was, in the words of Dr. Daniel Jacobson, lead researcher and chief scientist for computational systems biology at Oak Ridge, a “eureka moment.” The computer...

A lengthy and detailed description of how the covid-19 virus disrupts critical biological functions in the body and means of mitigating the damage it does.

Scientists recently completed the engineering design for the first of two paired supercomputers called the Science Data Processor (SDP). Together, these supercomputers will manage vast quantities of data collected by the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), a network of radio telescopes in Perth, Australia, and Cape Town, South Africa, SKA representatives said in a statement. When completed, the powerhouse processors — one installed in Perth and one in Cape Town — will wrangle 600 petabytes (1 petabyte is equal to a million gigabytes) of data per year, or "enough to fill more than a million average laptops," said Maurizio Miccolis, an...

Hot Chips Fujitsu has unfurled the blueprints for its homegrown high-performance Arm-based processors dubbed A64FX, the brains of its Post-K supercomputer. The designs were shown on Tuesday at a gathering of semiconductor engineers in Silicon Valley. The Post-K is a 1,000 peta-FLOPS monster – an exascale machine – that will supersede Japan's SPARC64-based K supercomputer. It is due to go online in 2021, and has just completed a round of trials that demonstrated the processors work – to some degree, at least.Post-K hopes to be the world's fastest publicly known supercomputer by the time it's fully powered up and consuming...

America’s new supercomputer beats China’s fastest machine to take the title of world’s most powerful Summit is a stepping stone toward a world of exascale computing. The winner: The US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee has taken the wraps off Summit, which boasts peak computing power of 200 petaflops, or 200 million billion calculations a second. That makes it a million times faster than your typical laptop. The loser: China. Summit is 60 percent faster than the previous supercomputing leader, the Sunway TaihuLight based in the Chinese city of Wuxi. Consolation prize: China still boasted way...

Full Title: PathForward: US Dept. of Energy Awards $258M in Research Contracts To Develop Exascale Supercomputer Technology Even though the major US national laboratories are just now starting to take delivery of the supercomputers they ordered a few years back, due to the long and complex development process for these projects, the US Department of Energy(DOE) has already been focusing on the next round of supercomputers for the next decade. Under the Exascale Computing Project, the DOE expects to develop & order one (and in the end, likely several) exaFLOPS-capable supercomputers, 50 times more powerful than the generation of supercomputers...

Before Steve Jobs, there was Seymour Cray – father of the supercomputer and regarded as something close to a God in the circles he moved in. Jobs’ Apple Computer is reputed to have bought one of Seymour’s massive machines back in the day: a Cray, to design the brand-new Macintosh personal computer. This would have been a significant moment for a man of Jobs' character, not prone to flattering the inventions or ideas of others. In return, Cray is said to have quipped that he'd bought a Mac to design the next Cray. Cray – who would have been 90...

China has produced a supercomputer capable of 54.9 petaflops, more than twice the speed of any system in the U.S., according to a U.S. researcher who was in China last week and learned the details. China's latest system was built with Intel chips, but includes indigenously produced Chinese technologies as well. The Chinese government spent about $290 million on it. [ Also on InfoWorld: Supercomputers face growing resilience problems. | Keep up on the day's tech news headlines with InfoWorld's Today's Headlines: Wrap Up newsletter. ] Today, the world's fastest supercomputer is at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. The...

Chip-company Adapteva announced on April 15th at the Linux Collaboration Summit in San Francisco, California, that they've built their first Parallella parallel-processing board for Linux supercomputing, and that they'll be sending them to their 6,300 Kickstarter supporters and other customers by this summer. Say hi to Parallella, the $99 Linux-powered supercomputer. (Image: The Linux Foundation) Linux has long been the number one supercomputer operating system. But while you could build your own Linux supercomputer using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products, it wouldn't be terribly fast. You needed hardware that could support massively parallel computing — the cornerstone of modern supercomputing. What Adapteva has...

Europe's fastest supercomputer was set to be unveiled on Friday in Munich. Its three petaflops of processing power will be used to explore new worlds, from the wonders of the cosmos to mysteries of the earth's core. The phenomenal processing power is equivalent to three billion people each holding a pocket calculator, each completing one million calculations every second. This is how IBM likes to represent the performance of their newest supercomputer, which at its three petaflop peak performance (FLOP—Floating Operations Per Second) is the fourth fastest in the world. … SuperMUC, which weighs more than 100 tonnes and has...