The International Supercomputing Conference (ISC18)kicked off Monday in Frankfurt, Germany, with Maria Girone, CTO of CERN openlabdeliveringthe opening keynote address. She explained how CERNs needs will drive exascale computation and data science innovation in the future.

The TOP500 list is an intensely valuable tool for the HPC community, tracking aggregate trends over 25 years. However, a few observers have noted that recent publications of the TOP500 list have many duplicate entries, often at anonymous sites.

FRANKFURT, Germany; BERKELEY, Calif.; and KNOXVILLE, Tenn.The TOP500 celebrates its 25th anniversary with a major shakeup at the top of the list. For the first time since November 2012, the US claims the most powerful supercomputer in the world, leading a significant turnover in which four of the five top systems were either new or substantially upgraded.

On Wednesday evening at the ISC High Performance conference, HPC luminary Dr. Thomas Sterling will deliver his customary keynote address on the state of high performance computing. To get something of a preview of that talk, we caught up with Sterling and asked him about some of the more pressing topics in the space.

Episode 229: Addison Snell and Michael Feldman preview ISC18 and take a look at the new petaflop ARM system announcement out of Sandia National Labs.

Fujitsu has produced the initial version of the ARM processor that will be used in Post-K, Japans first exascale supercomputer.

An impressive demonstration of an artificial intelligence system that can debate humans was witnessed by an audience at a recent IBM event in San Francisco.

Supercomputer-maker Cray has announced the ClusterStor L300F, a Lustre-based SSD storage system that joins a growing list of all-flash solutions.

Sandia National Laboratories will soon be taking delivery of the worlds most powerful supercomputer using ARM processors. The system, known as Astra, is being built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and will deliver 2.3 petaflops of peak performance when its installed later this year.

Wave Computing, one of the myriad Silicon Valley startups designing custom-built hardware for artificial intelligence, has bought MIPS Tech Inc.