^{Image Source: HPC Wire}

So far I've established that Cray is a major player in this new and exciting field of supercomputers. I've also demonstrated the fact that both Japan and the USA are heavily involved in a sort of supercomputing arms race. But one thing I haven't mentioned yet is some of the stiff competition that Cray may face moving forward.

SciNet and the University of Toronto recently unveiled the “Niagara,” Canada’s most-powerful supercomputer. As you can see above it is a massive system that utilizes a 1,500 dense Lenovo ThinkSystem SD530 high-performance compute nodes.

Now I'm going to get even more techy in saying that the Niagara is a beast that delivers 3 petaflops of Linpack performance. Basically its a processing powerhouse capable of performing calculations beyond the wildest imagination of PC users trying to render their latest youtube video.

According to a recent article published by HPC Wire, the Niagara serves researchers across Canada. It assists researchers in fields that include artificial intelligence, astrophysics, high-energy physics, climate change, oceanic research and other disciplines that require the use of big data.

“There isn’t a single field of research that can happen without high-performance computing,” said SciNet’s CTO Daniel Gruner in a video presentation. “All Canadians will benefit from Niagara because basic research, fundamental research, is so important to the development of what we now call applied research. Without the basic research nothing can happen.”

Niagara is one of four new systems being deployed to Compute Canada host sites. The others are Arbutus, a Lenovo-built OpenStack cloud system being deployed at the University of Victoria; Cedar, a 3.7-petaflop (peak) Dell system installed at Simon Fraser University, and Graham, a 2.6-petaflop (peak) Huawei-made cluster, located at the University of Waterloo.

As far as I understand, both Cray and Compute Canada are in direct competition creating supercomputers that blow the standard PC out of the water! Competition is good as it encourages speedier development and reduces overall costs of deployment in fields involving technology.

There's a large demand for supercomputers primarily coming from governments and giant multi-national corporations so there's plenty of investment to go around in this field as well.

^{Image Source: HPC Wire}

With a peak theoretical speed of 4.61 petaflops and a Linpack Rmax of 3 petaflops, Niagara ranks among the top 10 percent of fastest publicly benchmarked computers in the world today. System maker Lenovo has made both HPC and supercomputing a priority since it acquired IBM’s x86 business for $2.1 billion in 2014 and its ambitions aren’t stopping.

It’s deployed the fastest systems in Spain, Italy, Denmark, Norway, Australia, Canada, and soon in Germany with Leibniz Supercomputing Center, and it counts 87 Top500 systems (inclusive of all Top500 Lenovo classifications, i.e., Lenovo (81), Lenovo/IBM (3), IBM/Lenovo (2) and this collaboration). This puts it in second place by system share, behind HPE, and in third place after Cray and HPE based on aggregate list performance.

As you can see the stakes are huge and there are many big players including Lenovo, Cray and HPE. All of these corporations have huge budgets and the scale of their research and development departments is incredible. In the world of supercomputing its all about the petaflops!

What do you think about this supercomputing arms race? Do nations need to come together in terms of pooling their resources in an effort to improve co-operation? Do you think this new craze to create the most powerful supercomputer in the world will end well for humanity? What sort of use cases can you see being assisted through the use of these amazing supercomputers?

Here's a chance for the @ADSactly community to leave their thoughts and opinions on this topic!

Thanks for reading.

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Authored by: @techblogger

In-text citations sources:

'Japan is commissioning the world’s most powerful nuclear fusion research supercomputer' - The Verge

'SciNet Launches Niagara, Canada’s Fastest Supercomputer' - HPC Wire

Image Sources:

The Verge, HPC Wire, Pexels

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