Intel's new CEO: Chip world veteran Lip-Bu Tan
Restoring x86 giant to its former glory, a job no one will envy
Systems
12 Mar 2025 | 18
K Machine
I notice that the two big IBM machines use Infiniband. My favourite super computer is the Japanese K machine, that used a bespoke interconnect called Tofu. What was interesting about that machine was that the peak performance and sustained performance seemed to be pretty much the same - meaning the interconnect is pretty good (as one would expect for a six dimensional hypertoroid blended with a 4 dimensional hypercube).
I wonder just how good Infiniband is in comparison, and whether a bespoke interconnect made part of the cores (like Tofu is in K) would push these big IBM machines even further.
The nice thing about that if they did would be better machines for the rest of us! I'm already quite impressed by IBM bolting NVidia's custom link into Power9, quite a good feature that's helped with these machines I'm sure.
Fujitsu are looking at a new supercomputer machine, this time using ARM cores. Who knows, perhaps they can get on the top again.
And finally, 140 petaflops. Goodness me, that's a lot!
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