China Pushes Breadth-First Search Across Ten Million Cores

There is increasing interplay between the worlds of machine learning and high performance computing (HPC). This began with a shared hardware and software story since many supercomputing tricks of the trade play well into deep learning, but as we look to next generation machines, the bond keeps tightening. Many supercomputing sites are figuring out how to work deep learning into their existing workflows, either as a pre- or post-processing step, while some research areas might do away with traditional supercomputing simulations altogether eventually. While these massive machines were designed with simulations in mind, the strongest supers have architectures that parallel the unique requirements of training and inference workloads. One such system in the U.S. is the future Summit supercomputer coming to Oak Ridge National Lab later this year, but many of the other architectures that are especially sporting for machine learning are in China and Japan--and feature non-standard processing elements.