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

This inaugural, two-day AI Hardware summit held in Mountain View, California, at the Computer History Museum, brought together researchers, vendors, and users to explore the development of the AI ecosystem from a hardware perspective. Large companies, startups, and analysts joined to hear over 30 speakers and roundtables. Although the overall theme was all AI hardware, many of the presentations focused on AI processors and the work that is being done to design hardware to further the development of the evolving and growing field of AI, machine learning, and deep learning.

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.