After almost two years with data storage giant Western Digital, Ashley Gorakhpurwalla is getting used to the questions. They tend to boil down to the same query: “Why are you talking about hard drives? I thought hard drives were dead.” “I get that probably three years ago it was pretty …
UPDATED* Perhaps Janet Jackson should be the official spokesperson of the supercomputing industry. The US Department of Energy has a single 2 exaflops system up and running – well, most of it anyway – and that of course is the “Frontier” system at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and two more …
Both Hewlett-Packard and Compaq, which also included parallel database system maker Tandem and minicomputer innovator Digital Equipment Corp when HP bought Compaq for $25 billion back in September 2001, had histories as platform providers but the combined companies were not able to create on the X86 platform the kinds of …
Hewlett Packard Enterprise has been an early and enthusiastic supporter of alternate processor architectures outside of the standard Xeon X86 CPUs that comprise the vast majority of its revenues and shipments, particularly with Arm server chips starting in 2011. Maybe now, the fourth time will be the charm as it …
UPDATED* Until exascale supercomputers get a lot cheaper, which will allow weather forecasting models to run at a much smaller resolution – and more frequently – to deliver hyper-local weather forecasts, the actual weather forecasting is still going to be done by people. They will be armed with ever-improving models …
Enterprises have been shifting many of their workloads into the cloud to take advantage of the scalability, efficiencies, and economics those environments offer. The COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing sharp turn to remote work only accelerated those efforts. At the same time, during those years, companies also decided to keep some …
In the past several decades, data processing and storage systems could be architected from best of breed components, and the market could – and did – sustain multiple suppliers of competing technologies in each of the categories of compute, networking, and storage. But the post-Moore’s Law era, the IT sphere …
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It may have taken a while for the transition to 200 Gb/sec and 400 Gb/sec networking to take off in the datacenter, but this higher gear to switching is finally kicking in and delivering unprecedented bang for the buck in networks, and in fairly short order at least compared to …
The ink is barely dry on the PCI-Express 6.0 specification, which was released after years of development in January 2022, we hardly have PCI-Express 5.0 peripherals in the market, and the PCI-SIG organization that controls the PCI-Express standard for peripheral interconnects already has us all coveting the bandwidth that will …
In March 2020, when Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced the exascale “El Capitan” supercomputer contract had been awarded to system builder Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which was also kicking in its “Rosetta” Slingshot 11 interconnect and which was tapping future CPU and GPU compute engines from AMD, the HPC center was …
Decades of cloud collaborations and optimizations have brought solid performance and cost efficiencies to cloud. Those who require high performance computing (HPC) resources tend to set their own rules when it comes to systems. Highly tuned for blazing fast computation and communication with software stacks optimized to match, these users …
It is relatively easy to get a group of people that creates a new database management system or new data store. We know this because over the past five decades of computing, the rate of proliferation of tools to provide structure to data has increased, and it looks like at …
We have been excited about the possibilities of adding tiers of memory to systems, particularly persistent memories that are less expensive than DRAM but offer similar-enough performance and functionality to be useful. In particular, we have been strong advocates for disaggregating DRAM memory from the CPUs that make use of …
UPDATED: The EuroHPC Joint Undertaking, which is steering the development and funding for pre-exascale and exascale supercomputing in the European Union, has had a busy week. The first phase of the 550 petaflops “Lumi” system at CSC in Finland was dedicated and opened for processing, and Germany’s Forschungszentrum Jülich has …
A decade ago, Fangjin “FJ” Yang was a software architect at startup Metamarkets, a company that was building a user-facing analytics engine that a lot of developers simultaneously could go to, click on a UI, and very quickly get answers to their questions. It was a good idea, but it …
Exascale supercomputing is just as important to Europe as it is to the United States and China, but each of these geopolitical regions on Earth has its own way of developing architectures, funding their development and production, and figuring out where the best HPC centers are to host such machines …
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