Seasonal Changes in Q1 HPC Server Growth from 2004 to 2018

This Quick Take looks at the recent announcement by the Department of Energy (DOE) of the release of a Request for Proposal (RFP) for exascale systems to be installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in the 2021-2022 time frame. The RFP also says that a third system (different from the ORNL computer) may be installed at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) in 2022.

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.