News of Jeff Bezos’ flight to space hit the airwaves this month with fervor. Self-proclaimed space nerds, tech nerds, and the like swarmed the internet to watch billionaire Amazon tycoon and his crew take flight to the edge of space. He’s not the first and likely won’t be the last.

But before anyone can actually launch into the great beyond, a risk and safety analysis must be performed. This range safety calculates hazards and risks due to spacecraft malfunctions.  In simple terms, what happens to the civilian population if the space craft accidentally explodes; whose house is destroyed. 

To conduct this analysis there are thousands of data points to consider and equal or greater number of potential simulations that must be run.  This requires dedicated, secure, reliable, and consistent high performance computing power.   PSSC Labs on premise PowerWulf ZXR1+ HPC Clusters are employed by the Federal Aviation Authority FAA, United States Navy, United State Air Force, United States Space Force and others to perform this vital step in the mission launch protocol.  In fact no mission to space actually receives the green light for launch until the PowerWulf ZXR1+ HPC Clusters have completed their range safety analysis. 

For over 25 years, PSSC Labs has been providing custom, on-premise high performance computing systems designed to meet our clients’ unique enterprise computing challenges, no matter what they may be. We are experts in deep learning solutions, HPC AI, and big data applications. PSSC Labs is committed to delivering relentless performance with the absolute lowest total cost of ownership all backed with industry-leading US-based support. We’re confident we’ll have the perfect custom computing solution for you. 

For more information on our PowerWulf ZXR1+ HPC Cluster, visit our website and take a look at the cluster tech specs.

AMD recently announced the release of the third iteration of AMD EPYC™   CPUs, touted as “the world’s highest performing server processor” by AMD. Milan hit the market as a replacement for the Rome processor family on March 15th, 2021. Achieving top marks in performance and security, Milan is changing the game for those looking for high-powered processors for their HPC and AI servers.

Notable Characteristics of AMD EPYC Milan CPUs:

• Scaling from 8 to 128 cores
• Up to 16 double-precision FLOPS per cycle per core
• All new “Zen3” cores delivering up to 19% IPC uplift
• Up to 32MB of L3 cache per core, up to 256MG L3 cache per CPU
• New AMD Infinity Guard powering confidential computing
• 4-6-8 memory channel interleaving offering more configuration flexibility
• Support for PCI-Express generation 4.0 (2x the throughput of gen 3.0)
• 128 lanes of PCI-Express 4.0 per CPU socket

The latest generation of AMD EPYC CPUs offer excellent performance, like many of AMD CPU generations in the past. Most models in Milan offer at least 1 TFLOPS, with the 64-core CPUs providing 2+ TFLOPS. Lower-performing models might provide fewer CPU cores and L3 cache memory, while models on the higher end of performance offer higher core counts.

PSSC Labs is also offering free AMD EPYC benchmarking system analysis to further support your decision making process. If you are interested please complete the form below and one of our engineers will be in touch with you.

AMD EPYC™ Milan Processor Tech Specs

What AMD 3rd Gen CPUs Mean for Industry Applications

Weather Modeling
These new AMD EPYC processors offer significant improvements for meteorologists. The key is this solution provides weather modeling systems with higher core counts combined with higher speed processors that allow more models to be run in a given period of time, which is critical for the accurate and timely weather modeling.  The ability to answer questions surrounding wind speed and direction has the potential to impact designated fire risk zones or how organizations should reposition their assets to avoid flooding disasters. The increased processing capabilities of these third series of AMD EPYC series processors have the power to help organizations save lives and protect property. Our current projects are supporting meteorologists leveraging the AMD-based PowerWulf ZXR1+ HPC Cluster, which will have a profound impact on individuals and companies alike.

Life Sciences
Life Science professionals working with bioinformatics or genomics, or any other type of life science research, are always concerned on how many cores they can get in their HPC system. With the new AMD EPYC processors, life science researchers are now able to pack more processing cores into their high performance computing environments at a very competitive cost per core. With the amount of focus being put on virology research due to COVID-19, these third generation AMD EPYC processors stand to play as significant of a role as the researchers themselves. Being able to deliver solutions with enough processing cores to handle an ever-increasing amount of data means faster time-to-answers, benefitting us all going forward.

Design & Engineering
The ability of engineers to throw significantly more and significantly faster processor cores at their design and engineering models and simulations ultimately is what allows for finer mesh models and more models overall. The new AMD EPYC Milan CPUs offer two additional performance enhancements that will significantly improve design and engineering workloads — faster memory access speeds with more memory channels and PCI Express 4.0 buses. Both of these features offer faster access of data to and from processor cores, which is critical when dealing with low latency applications from companies like Metacomp Technologies, Star CCM and Ansys.

Take a look at the PSSC Labs family of  products and use our product configurator tool on any of our product pages to see your specific configuration options. The configurator tool can also be used to request a quote, which we’ll return in 24 hours or less.

PSSC Labs builds technology for visionaries seeking handcrafted computing solutions that will take their work to the next level. With the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) and no need to sacrifice on performance, reliability or security, the PSSC Labs team and product suite are  true innovators offering high performance computing solutions to solve the world’s most demanding problems. Our 25+ years of experience is highlighted in our work with organizations of all sizes and a variety of industries, including many departments within the United States government, Fortune 500 companies, as well as small and medium-sized businesses.

All products are designed and built in the U.S.  at the PSSC Labs  headquarters in Lake Forest, California.

During Women’s History Month, we like to celebrate the many achievements and milestones of women around the world, but especially those rooted in science and technology. As a technology company that is also a woman-owned small business, the hard work of women everywhere does not go unnoticed in our offices and it’s something we like to call attention to whenever possible. Here are a few of our favorite techie women and their amazing accomplishments:

Women Technology Pioneers

1. Ada Lovelace

Ada Lovelace, born in 1815, is widely known as the “first programmer”. Her mother had her homeschooled in science and mathematics as a young girl and her work includes her focus on the notion that a specific engine could be built with the ability to transition from a calculation to computation. The second Tuesday of October is known as Ada Lovelace Day as a nod to all of the achievements of women in STEM careers.

2. Grace Hopper

Grace Hopper was born in 1906 and attended Yale University where she received a Ph.D. in mathematics. She joined the Naval Reserve shortly after where she worked with Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corp. During her time with Eckert-Mauchly, she designed a compiler that translated a programmer’s instructions into computer code. A few years later, she developed the first English language data processing compiler. She received several awards over the course of her career, one of them being the Presidential Medal of Freedom that was awarded to her by Former President Barack Obama in 2016.

3. Hedy Lamarr

Hedy was a self-taught inventor, awarded for a patent for her “secret communication system” in 1942. The system was intended to be a way to set radio-guided torpedoes off course during wartimes, but eventually the idea inspired technology we use on a daily basis today, like Wi-Fi, GPS, and Bluetooth.

4. Annie Easley

When we talk about women in technology, Easley is always at the top of the list. Easley was a NASA rocket scientist and a trailblazer for women, and specifically black women, in the technology space. Her work as a computer scientist laid the foundations for space shuttle launches for years to come.

5. Reshma Saujani

Saujani is the founder of the tech organization, Girls Who Code, a nonprofit organization that was built to support and increase the number of women working in computer science. Saujani founded the organization upon noticing the lack of presence of women in technology positions and women-led organizations. Girls Who Code will help to equip young women with the technology skills necessary to pursue a career in computer programming and the technology industry, potentially increasing the amount of women working in these career fields in the future.

5. Danah Boyd

Boyd is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and the founder of Data & Society, a website focused on producing original research on various technology topics, like AI and automation, the impact of technology on labor and health, and more. Boyd received a Ph.D. at the School of Information at the University of California – Berkeley and her Master’s Degree at MIT. Her work with Data & Society calls out the rippling effects and changes of technology and her work at Microsoft Research has been applied in biomedical machine learning, economics and computation, and more.

The women listed above are just a handful of the many women that have significantly impacted the technology industry and whose achievements deserve to be celebrated. This March, we lift up the voices of women in tech around the world and celebrate their important contributions.

Early this year, President Biden signed an Executive order designed to ensure that federal government agencies buy more goods and services produced in the United States. The Executive order comes from the President’s campaign promises to resuscitate the ailing domestic manufacturing industry, one of the industries hit hardest in the storm of COVID-19.

What American Manufacturers Can Expect

According to the White House, the order allows for the creation of a website that will show the various government contracts that are being awarded to foreign vendors. An American business can then bid on the contract to notify the government that an American-made alternative is available. Calls to ramp-up the American manufacturing industry come in the aftermath of COVID-19, which in its early days, had left the U.S. with extremely limited supplies of materials needed to combat the viruses spread, including important personal protective equipment like masks and gloves as well as cleaning supplies and hand sanitizer.

Critics point out that potential issues always can arise with Executive orders of this nature, including higher costs for taxpayers, potential backlash from foreign nations, and an unlikeliness to bring home lost manufacturing jobs. But as a “Buy American” sentiment begins to make its way through the federal government, we can’t help but point out how significant it is for federal agencies to work with American-made equipment, particularly in the technology industry. The risks associated with purchasing electronics equipment from foreign vendors are potentially too high – cybersecurity and data privacy are just two of the issues that come to mind. Protecting your data can become much more difficult when you put its management into the hands of a foreign nation, something that U.S. federal agencies simply can’t afford to do.

Twenty-five years ago, we found the solution that the federal government needs – American-made, on-premise high performance computing (HPC) systems, custom-built to meet the unique enterprise computing challenges that our clients face. PSSC Labs solutions are deployed in some of the world’s most demanding organizations including NASA, NIH, the U.S Air Force, FBI, and more. For questions about our systems or American-made manufacturing process, please contact us at 4sales@site-a.com or give us a call at (949) 380-7288.