TOP500 News
For the first time, Google’s DeepMind machine learning technology is being used in a medical research application, in this case, for the detection of two of the most common eye diseases: diabetic retinopathy and age-related macular degeneration (AMD). If the software is as successful in this endeavor as it was with AlphaGo, the DeepMind-powered application that vanquished Go champions Fan Hui and Lee Sedol, ophthalmology may never be the same.
The University of Melbourne has deployed a new type of HPC system that combines both a physical cluster and a virtual one. Called Spartan, the new machine is built around the idea that there are basically two types of HPC users: the so-called power users, who want lots of compute, memory, and bandwidth for long-running applications; and those with more modest requirements, who need to run a plethora of much smaller jobs. Spartan provides resources aimed at both audiences.
If ROSS was an actual human, he would certainly be the highest paid legal assistant in history. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of legal texts, and devours new ones quickly and effortlessly. Better yet, he can work seven days a week, 24 hours a day, and requires no office supplies, health insurance or retirement programs. Yes, ROSS is a computer program and his designation as a male is just one of convenience.
In the latest TOP500 rankings, the number of supercomputers that reached a Linpack petaflop or more grew to 95 systems – nearly a fifth of the list. The number of such systems has been growing steadily since IBM’s Roadrunner broke the petaflop barrier in 2008. And while machines of this magnitude are still considered elite, hardly a month goes by now without a new system or two being deployed.
One of the most popular sessions at last week’s ISC High Performance conference was titled "Scaling Beyond the End of Moore’s Law," which was a series of three talks that delved into some of the technology options that could reanimate computing after CMOS hits the wall sometime in the next decade. The subject’s popularity is unsurprising, given that the supercomputing digerati that attend this event are probably more obsessed with Moore’s two-year cadence of transistor shrinkage than any other group of people on the planet.
With the launch of the Knight’s Landing Xeon Phi, Intel is hoping to capitalize on the unmet demand for an alternative to the GPU. The previous incarnations of Xeon Phi weren’t quite on par with their GPU counterparts in some significant ways, especially in the performance realm. But Knight’s Landing has made up a lot of lost ground in FLOPS, while offering the convenience of being able to run without the assist of a CPU host.
Multiple outlets are reporting that Oak Ridge National Lab’s (ORNL) Summit supercomputer, one of the three pre-exascale systems being developed for the Department of Energy under its CORAL program, will hit 200 petaflops when it becomes operational in two years. The implication is that the US is responding to the announcement of TaihuLight, the new Chinese supercomputer that captured the top spot on the latest TOP500 list. But the storyline here is a lot more nuanced than that.
Machine Learning Takes Aim at Blindness Prevention
Aussies Build HPC Cluster/Cloud Hybrid
Watson Spawns Digitized Legal Assistant
Petaflop Club Closes in on 100 Members