ORNL’s Summit Supercomputer: World’s Fastest HPC On Wide Application Base

This Quick Take looks at Amazon's recent announcement of a new EC2 Bare Metal offering that provides users with direct, non-virtualized access to a processor, memory, storage and related networking instance. Amazon uses custom hardware in an effort to wring out the highest possible performance from the basic hardware set up while still offering a full complement of cloud-based software support. This development is a positive one for HPC users looking to migrate workloads to public clouds as Amazon is addressing one of the most vexinghurdles of HPC in the cloud: the performance overhead of running applicationsin a virtualized, performance limiting environment.

Taiwan-based TSMC, the world's largest chip foundry, recently announced (https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332869) that high performance computing (HPC) has supplanted smart phones as the most important driver of its business, although presumably not yet the largest financially.