The Next Platform

A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall In Public Cloud

Way back in the early days of the commercial Internet, when we all logged into what seemed to be new but what was actually a quite old service used by academic institutions and government agencies that rode on the backbones of the telecommunications network, there were many, many thousands of Internet service providers who provided the interface between our computers and the network capacity that was the onramp of the information superhighway.

Most of these ISPs are gone today, and have been replaced by a few major telco, cable, and wireless network operators who provide us with our Internet service. …
Read more
Forging Composable Infrastructure For Memory-Centric Systems

For years, enterprises have wanted to pool and then carve up the myriad resources of the datacenter to enable them to more efficiently run their workloads, reduce power consumption, and improve utilization rates. It takes what seems like an endless series of technologies advances to move towards this goal. But, ever so slowly, we are getting there.

Virtualization that started in the servers flowed into the storage realm and eventually into the network, and converged systems mashing up virtual compute and virtual networking soon begat hyperconverged infrastructure, which added in virtual storage – one of the fastest growing segments …
Read more
Getting Logical About Cavium ThunderX2 Versus Intel Skylake

Any processor that hopes to displace the Xeon as the engine of choice for general purpose compute has to do one of two things, and we would argue both: It has to be a relatively seamless replacement for a Xeon processor inside of existing systems, much as the Opteron was back in the early 2000s, and it has to offer compelling advantages that yield better performance per dollar per watt per unit of space in a rack.

The “Vulcan” ThunderX2 chips, at least based on the initial information that is available in the wake of their launch, appear to do …
Read more
A Revival in Custom Hardware For Accelerated Genomics

Building custom processors and systems to annotate chunks of DNA is not a new phenomenon but given the increasing complexity of genomics as well as explosion in demand, this trend is being revived.

Those that have been around in this area in the last couple of decades will recall that back in 2000, the then Celera Genomics acquired Paracel Genomics (an accelerator and software company) for $250 million who at the time had annual sales of $14.2 million. Paracel had a system they called GeneMatcher, who were able to fit 7,000 processors into a box that could compete with over …
Read more
HPE Buys Its Way Into Virtual Networking With Plexxi

It is safe to say that companies that have traditionally built server, storage, and switch hardware have had a tough time finding their place in a world that is increasingly allergic to appliances and wants everything to come as software that customers have more control over. Even those vendors that are innovating at the hardware level have a heavy software hook, and no hardware vendor can leave itself in the position of just shifting boxes if it hopes to have a profitable business.

Hence the recent acquisitions by both Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Dell, of course, shelled out a …
Read more
CoreOS Is New Linux, Not A RHEL Classic Killer

One of the most important lessons in marketing is that you don’t change something that is working, but that you also have to be able to carefully and cautiously innovate to protect against changing tastes or practices that might also spell doom for the business.

Two and a half decades ago, Coca-Cola famously made a mistake in trying to push New Coke, a different formula that was sweeter and more like Pepsi, replacing the original Coke, which had to be brought back as Coke Classic and which, eventually, killed off New Coke completely. Coca-Cola was not just changing things for …
Read more
Chewing A Billion By Billion Matrix Crammed Into Gigabytes Of Memory

Sometimes, to appreciate a new technology or technique, we have to get into the weeds a bit. As such, this article is somewhat more technical than usual. But the key message that new libraries called ExaFMM and HiCMA gives researchers the ability to operate on billion by billion matrices using machines containing only gigabytes of memory, which gives scientists a rather extraordinary new ability to run on really big data problems.

King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) has been enhancing the ecosystem of numerical tools for multi-core and many-core processors. The effort, which is a collaboration between KAUST, …
Read more
Nvidia Hitting On All GPU Cylinders

Even if Nvidia had not pursued a GPU compute strategy in the datacenter a decade and a half ago, the company would have turned in one of the best periods in its history as the first quarter of fiscal 2019 came to a close on April 29.

As it turns out, though, the company has a fast-growing HPC, AI, and cryptocurrency compute business that runs alongside of its core gaming GPU, visualization, and professional graphics businesses, and Nvidia is booming. That is a six cylinder engine of commerce, unless you break AI into training and inference (which is sensible), and …
Read more
Tearing Apart Google’s TPU 3.0 AI Coprocessor

Google did its best to impress this week at its annual IO conference. While Google rolled out a bunch of benchmarks that were run on its current Cloud TPU instances, based on TPUv2 chips, the company divulged a few skimpy details about its next generation TPU chip and its systems architecture. The company changed from version notation (TPUv2) to revision notation (TPU 3.0) with the update, but ironically the detail we have assembled shows that the step from TPUv2 to what we will call TPUv3 probably isn’t that big; it should probably be called TPU v2r5 or something like that. …
Read more
What Qualcomm’s Exit From Arm Server Chips Means

Broadcom may not have wanted to be in the Arm server chip business any more, but its machinations since it was acquired by Avago Technology two years ago have certainly sent ripples through that nascent market. It did it in the wake of buying Broadcom, and now it looks like it is doing it again with Qualcomm.

Before it shelled out a stunning $37 billion to buy Broadcom, best known for its datacenter switch ASICs but also an Arm server chip wannabe at the time, Avago was a conglomerate that made chips for optical networking, server networking, and storage controllers …
Read more
Hitachi Pulls Itself Together In The Datacenter

Hitachi is a massive multi-national conglomerate that has more than 300,000 employees and 950 subsidiaries and a reach that extends into a wide array of industries, from aircraft and automotive systems to telecommunications, construction, defense and financial services. It also is among the world’s largest IT companies, nestled in there among the likes of Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Samsung. Hitachi’s sprawling technology capabilities ranges from compute and storage appliances in its well-known Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) unit to datacenter management software, data management and business intelligence, and the Internet of Things.

For the past several years, the company …
Read more
IBM Rounds Out Power9 Systems For HPC, Analytics

Back in the early 1990s, when IBM has having its near-death experience as the mainframe business faltered, Unix systems were making huge inroads into the datacenter, and client/server computing was pulling work off central systems and onto PCs, the company was on the ropes and probably close to bankruptcy. At the time, the Wall Street Journal ran a central A1 column story, where a bunch of CIOs who were unhappy with Big Blue were brutally honest about how they felt.

One of them – and we have never been able to forget this quote – who had moved to other …
Read more
The Pantheon Of Services In Nutanix Acropolis

While there is a battle of sorts going on between hyperconverged architectures and disaggregated ones, it is probably safe to assume that at the scale that most enterprises run, they could care less about which one they choose so long as either architecture does what they need to support applications. Enterprises will find some use for both hyperconverged platforms that merge virtual compute and virtual storage for many years to come, but we would also bet that over the long haul, compute and storage will be disaggregated and connected by fast and vast networks because, frankly, that is how Google …
Read more
AI Redefines Performance Requirements At The Edge

In a broad sense, the history of computing is the constant search for the ideal system architecture. Over the last few decades system architects have continually shifted back and forth from centralized configurations where computational resources are located far from the user to distributed architectures where processing resources were located closer to the individual user.

Early systems used a highly centralized model to deliver increased computational power and storage capabilities to users spread across the enterprise. During the 1980s and 1990s, those centralized architectures gave way to the rise of low cost PCs and the emergence of LANs and then …
Read more
Blending An Elixir Of Quantum And AI For Better Healthcare

Chocolate and peanut butter, tea and scones, gin and tonic, they’re all great combinations, and today we now have a new binary mixture — Quantum and AI. Do they actually mix well together? Quadrant, a new spin out from D-Wave Systems, certainly seems to think so.

D-Wave has been in the quantum computing business since 1999, raising in excess of $200 million from Goldman Sachs, Bezos Expeditions and others, they now list folks such as Google, NASA, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Volkswagen as examples of their signature customers. Quadrant is basically the new AI play from the …
Read more
AI Frameworks And Hardware: Who Is Using What?

The world of AI software is quickly evolving. New applications are coming on the scene on almost a daily basis, and now is a good time to try to get a handle on what people are really doing with machine learning and other AI techniques and where they might be headed.

In our first two articles trying to assess what is happening out there in the enterprise when it comes to AI – Lagging In AI? Don’t Worry, It’s Still Early and New AI Being Mostly Used To Solve Old Problems – we discussed how real-world users are approaching AI …
Read more
ThunderX2 Arms Hyperscale And HPC Compute

In the long run, networking chip giant and one-time server chip wannabe Broadcom might regret selling off its “Vulcan” 64-bit Arm chip business to Cavium, soon to be part of Marvell. The ThunderX2 processors based on the Vulcan designs have been tweaked by Cavium and have been enthusiastically tire-kicked by hyperscalers and HPC centers alike, and are looking like the front runner as a competitor to the X86 architecture for these customers.

The 32-core Vulcan variants of the ThunderX2, which we detailed last November, are getting their own coming out party in San Francisco now that they …
Read more
Successful Machine Learning With A Global Data Fabric

One of the most common misconceptions about machine learning is that success is solely due to its dynamic algorithms. In reality, the learning potential of those algorithms and their models are driven by the data preparation, staging and delivery. When suitably fed, machine learning algorithms work wonders. Their success, however, is ultimately rooted in the data logistics.

Data logistics are integral to how sufficient training data is accessed. They determine how easily new models are deployed. They specify how changes in data content can be isolated to compare models. And, they facilitate how multiple models are effectively used as part …
Read more
Fabrics Open The Way For Storage Class Memory

Dell EMC has long been a vocal proponent of NVM-Express, the up and coming protocol that cuts out the CPU jib-jab with PCI-Express peripherals and that boost throughput and drops latency for flash and other non-volatile memory.

For the past two years, Dell, like other system makers, has put NVM-Express drives in its servers while ramping up the flash in its high-end storage systems and preparing to bring the protocol to those external storage appliances. It has taken time to get the arrays reworked, for the price of NVM-Express drives to come down, and for the volumes to ramp up. …
Read more
HPC Container Security: Fact, Myth, Rumor, And Kernels

It is fair to say that containers in HPC are a big deal. Nothing more clearly shows the critical nature of any technology than watching the community reaction when a new security issue is discovered and released.

In a recent announcement from the team over at Sylabs, they stated that multiple container systems on kernels that do not support PR_SET_NO_NEW_PRIVS were now vulnerable. This was big news, and it obviously spread like a proverbial wildfire through the HPC community, with many mostly voicing their upset that the initial announcement came out at the start of a long holiday weekend …
Read more

Previous Articles