The Piz Daint supercomputer holds a special place in our memories. Besides being the computer the Swiss from time to time loaned to CERN, its speed was later accelerated by the use of Nvidia GPUs. Here's a quick note from April 2016:
CERN Will Be Using NVIDIA Graphics Processors to Accelerate Their Supercomputer (NVDA)
Our standard NVDA boilerplate: We don't do much with individual stocks on the blog but this one is special.$36.28 last, passing the stock's old all time high from 2007, $36.00. [adjust for 40:1 stock splits, that's 90 cents on the current $139.00 stock. We had started touting it at $25.00/0.625 a year earlier]
In 2017 Oak Ridge National Laboratory is scheduled to complete their newest supercomputer powered by NVIDIA Graphics Processing Unit chips and retake the title of World's Fastest Computer for the United States.
In the meantime NVDA is powering AI deep learning and autonomous vehicles and virtual reality and some other stuff.....
And from Swissinfo, October 3:
Swiss Alps supercomputer to leverage AI for science
Switzerland has rebooted its supercomputer network back into the global premier league of data processing. But who gets to use the sixth most powerful supercomputer in the world and what does it hope to achieve?
Mapping the universe, sorting health facts from conspiracy theories and more precise climate modelling are just some use cases for Switzerland’s Alps supercomputer. But there are no immediate plans to allow private companies to tap into its resources.
Switzerland’s previous supercomputer, Piz Daint, has been crunching numbers for scientific research projects since 2013. It has served, among others, the Swiss meteorological service, the federal materials testing institute and the Paul Scherrer Institute of engineering sciences.
Piz Daint has now been replaced by the Alps Supercomputer, which will have 20 times the computing power of its predecessor when fully operational and the muscle to exploit the potential of artificial intelligence (AI).
It’s also the world’s sixth most powerful computer, with only the United States, Finland and Japan having more powerful machines. This has restored Switzerland’s supercomputing capabilities compared to other countries, which had been lost when Piz Daint was overtaken by more powerful machines around the world.
Access limited to science projects
But this does not mean 20 times more researchers will have access to the powerful computing network, which stretches over three sites in Switzerland and one in Italy. Some 1,800 researchers took advantage of the Piz Daint supercomputer and, so far, 1,000 have signed up to the new Alps network.“We cannot serve a million researchers on this system,” Professor Thomas Schulthess, head of the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS), told SWI swissinfo.ch. For a start, the CHF100 million ($118 million) supercomputer, with an annual operating budget pf CHF37 million, is funded out of the public purse. “We are a subsidised infrastructure, and subsidies don’t scale. We must be very disciplined in how the infrastructure is used,” said Schulthess....
....MUCH MORE
Supercomputers "The 49th TOP500 List was published June 20, 2017 in Frankfurt, Germany."
