CXL and Gen-Z Consortiums Combine Forces

The Department of Energy at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) recently announced plans for the development of a 1.5 exaflops system called Frontier to be delivered in 2021. US HPC maker Cray and chip maker AMD are the two key US commercial partners in this effort. Despite numerous press articles centered on the 1.5 exaflops peak performance of Frontier, ORNL's original RFP released in April of 2018 clearly called out the diverse workload requirements that Frontier would have to successfully handle that span the traditional modeling and simulation sector, big data analysis, and AI applications, while demonstrating a 50X improvement in solving key DOE science problems that today run at the 20 petaflops level. To meet those ambitious goals, strong support from DOE's companion $1.7 billion Exascale Computing Project (ECP) will be critical.

IBM's decision to acquire Red Hat not only boosts the combined firm's potential to exploit the overall cloud market, but it will likely have a significant impact on the global technical computing market as well. This is based on the rapidly growing number of enterprise IT data centers that are integrating HPC into their AI and other data-intensive workloads that their enterprise servers cannot effectively handle alone.