In any case, HPC Wire makes some projections for the upcoming 2018.
IBM to rejuvenate the past glory
Since the abandonment of x86 system business, IBM's development is not successful, the development of acclaimed Power8 system is not as expected, after all, to create a new ecosystem is not easy, but with the introduction of Power9, IBM and Open Source Server Architecture OpenPOWER Fund Will be able to regain a city.
The AI-optimized chip will support a wide range of accelerators such as FPGAs and GPUs as well as high-speed interconnects such as NVLink and OpenCAPI, as well as high-bandwidth memory technologies. In addition, the world expects very high expectations for the IBM Summit supercomputer, It is likely to make it to the top 500 list announced in June 2018, making it the world's most powerful supercomputer with peak performance of 150-200 giga-petabytes per second (petaFLOPS).
IBM will launch its Summit-based server and more OpenPOWER community adoption. 2018 will be IBM a year of harvest results, after all, the computing giant not only continued growth in the cloud business, but also for quantum computing, business plan , Neuromorphic chips and other research, as well as a variety of storage, software, host, service product portfolio.
AMD re-enters the data center market
AMD, abandoning the data market a few years ago, came back with the new EPYC processor in 2017. One of AMD's strategies is to provide cost-effective products. Some of the EPYC product lines are designed for a single socket server host design, and these The machine has nearly gone extinct in the data center in recent years, but AMD said 50% of the market is buying a two-socket solution because there is no other choice, which is why AMD introduced a single slot product.
In addition, to meet the needs of different applications, AMD launched a total of 32, 24, 16 core products, of which the most high-end products targeted for high-performance computing workload market.
The fog that enveloped quantum computing will not fade for the moment
Quantum operations buoyant development dizzying, it is difficult to see the mainstream of quantum computing.Philip Ball recently published in "Nature" papers provide a lot of information on quantum computing and interesting insights.Wall said that compared to the forecast Quantum computing seems to be sweeping the IT community, computer scientists and engineers, who are more concerned with the concept of quantum advantage, a conceptual tool used to discuss the differences between classical and quantum computing methods.
It now seems that it will take several years for quantum computing to become clear, but some specific applications for quantum communication may appear earlier.
AI continues to be the focus
Almost every new vendor offers AI hardware, services, or chips for AI, including new architectures, advanced accelerators, the rise of mixed-precision machines, etc. Intel chief executive Brian Krzanich wrote a few days ago As mentioned in the employee's memo, it is impossible for the future to make perfect predictions, but one thing can be determined 100%. That is the role of data, and AI computing will be an important part of pushing forward all operations.
HPC's Identity Crisis will continue
HPC represents something very specific to the HPE industry, designing low-latency interconnects and parallel file systems for high-performance, scalable guest applications, but today's high-performance computing pan Refers to any form of scientific computing, the scope is also much larger.
Review 2017 and Outlook 2018 Container technology will continue in 2018, NVIDIA will continue to introduce new products, but probably will not be the best-selling products such as the V100 2018. Intel introduced Skylake chip, and has been widely used, and to the business community The so-called easy-to-deploy HPC vertical solution will go off fever, and ARM will continue to tap into new markets but still require more on-line systems to assess its effectiveness.
In 2017, many personnel changes occurred. For example, Diane Bryant of Intel fought against Google. AI pioneer Andrew Ng left Baidu and Intel digged into a corner. Raja Koduri, chief architect of AMDRadeon Technology Group, and Meg Whitman resigned as chairman of the board. Antonio Neri took over.