Incremental Progress for China’s Commercial Quantum Computing Sector

Major government buyers we interviewed consistently named Cray as one of the handful of global supercomputer makers capable of true innovation at the system architecture level. These vendors maintain their ability to stay at the forefront of the HPC market by continually reinventing themselves and their products. Cray's capture of the $600 million CORAL 2 contract to deliver the 1.5-exaflops Frontier supercomputer to ORNL in 2021 is the company's latest demonstration of its ability to mutate in response to the evolving HPC market environment.

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.