edgepedia

Servers, supercomputers & data centers

169 articles

General

Piz Daint

Piz Daint was a petascale supercomputer at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) in Lugano, installed in 2012 as a Cray XC30 with NVIDIA GPUs and ranked third worldwide in 2017 at 19.59 petaflops.

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PolarDC Group

PolarDC Group, known as Polar, is a Norway-based developer, owner, and operator of hydroelectric-powered data centers for AI and high-performance computing tenants, controlled by H.I.G. Capital since October 2024.

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Power distribution unit

A power distribution unit (PDU) splits one electrical input feed across multiple outlets, most often as a rack PDU that supplies servers and storage in data center racks.

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PRACE

PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) is a Brussels-based nonprofit association that allocated access to top-tier European supercomputers via peer review from 2010 to 2022.

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QTS Realty Trust

QTS Realty Trust is an American data center company serving hyperscale, enterprise, and government clients, acquired by Blackstone in 2021 for about $10 billion including debt.

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Quadrics

Quadrics was a British company based in Bristol that made the QsNet high-performance interconnect used in TOP500 supercomputers such as ASCI Q before closing in 2009.

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Quantinuum

Quantinuum is an American quantum computing company formed in 2021 from Honeywell Quantum Solutions and Cambridge Quantum, headquartered in Broomfield, Colorado, and traded on Nasdaq as QNT.

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QuEra

QuEra Computing is a Boston-based quantum computing company founded in 2018 as a Harvard and MIT spinout, operating Aquila, a 256-qubit neutral-atom processor available on Amazon Braket.

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Raised floor

A raised floor, also called an access floor, is an elevated floor on pedestals used in data centers to route cabling and distribute cooling air to equipment.

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Real-time decoding of surface codes

Real-time decoding of surface codes means computing error-correction decisions from syndrome measurements fast enough to keep pace with a quantum processor's microsecond error-correction cycle, typically using FPGAs.

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River Bend (data center)

River Bend is an AI data center campus in St. Francisville, Louisiana, developed by Hut 8 with up to $10 billion in Phase I investment and Fluidstack as anchor tenant.

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San Diego Supercomputer Center

The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) is a national supercomputing center at UC San Diego, founded in 1985 with National Science Foundation funding for academic researchers.

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Scalable Coherent Interface

The Scalable Coherent Interface (SCI) is an interconnect standard, IEEE 1596-1992, providing computer-bus-like services over point-to-point links for multiprocessors, including distributed shared memory with optional cache coherence.

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SDS Sigma 7

The SDS Sigma 7 was a 32-bit word-oriented mainframe announced by Scientific Data Systems in 1966, the largest Sigma model at introduction and an IBM System/360 competitor.

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Setonix

Setonix is the flagship supercomputer of the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre in Kensington, Western Australia, built by Hewlett Packard Enterprise on the HPE Cray EX architecture.

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SGI Origin (server)

SGI Origin is a family of ccNUMA servers from Silicon Graphics introduced in 1996, presenting globally shared memory across nodes scalable to 1024 processors and 1 TB of memory, and running IRIX.

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Shasta architecture

Shasta architecture is the supercomputer platform developed by Cray and continued by HPE as HPE Cray EX, underpinning the first US exascale systems: Frontier, Aurora, and El Capitan.

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Single system image

Single system image (SSI) is a computing paradigm that makes a cluster of machines appear to users and applications as one large, unified computer, hiding the underlying distributed resources.

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Slurm

Slurm is an open-source, highly scalable cluster management and job scheduling system for Linux clusters, begun at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 2002 and now powering a majority of TOP500 supercomputers.

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Space-based data center

A space-based data center, also called an orbital data center, hosts processors and storage on satellites in orbit, powered by solar energy and cooled by radiating heat into space.

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SPEC CPU

SPEC CPU is a family of computer benchmark suites from the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation that measures compute-intensive performance by compiling and running real application source code.

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Spectrum-X

Spectrum-X is NVIDIA's Ethernet networking platform for AI data centers, announced in 2023, pairing Spectrum Ethernet switches with BlueField SuperNICs to deliver high bandwidth, low latency, and performance isolation for multi-tenant AI workloads.

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Split brain (computing)

Split brain in computing is a cluster failure state in which a network partition gives nodes conflicting membership views, risking data corruption; quorum and I/O fencing prevent it.

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Stampede3

Stampede3 is a supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin, serving as the NSF ACCESS ecosystem's primary open-science resource since 2024.

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STFC Hartree Centre

The STFC Hartree Centre is a UK research center for high performance computing, data analytics, and AI, helping businesses and the public sector adopt these technologies since opening in 2013.

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Strong scaling

Strong scaling is the study of how a parallel application's performance changes as processors increase while the total problem size stays fixed, limited by Amdahl's law.

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Summit (supercomputer)

Summit, also known as OLCF-4 or IBM Summit, was an IBM-built supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory that debuted in June 2018 as the world's fastest supercomputer.

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Sun Fire

Sun Fire was a brand of server computers sold by Sun Microsystems from 2001, spanning SPARC and x86-64 systems, and phased out after Oracle's 2010 acquisition.

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Sun Microsystems

Sun Microsystems was an American computer company founded in 1982 and named for the Stanford University Network; it created Java and was acquired by Oracle in 2010.

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Supercomputer

A supercomputer, also called a high-performance computer, is a system of many computers working in parallel to model complex systems like weather, climate, and the universe.