There was a bit of a kerfuffle this week when it looked like AMD was changing its position a little bit on whether or not it would get back into designing and selling server chips based on the Arm architecture. The funny thing is that the world has changed around …
In the longest of runs, say within the next five to ten years, in the large datacenters of the world, the server chassis as we know it will no longer exist. We aren’t talking about the bent metal here. We are talking about ending the tyranny of the motherboard, which …
There is nothing at all wrong with legacy application and system software as long as it can deliver scalability, reliability, and performance. Changing from one software stack to another is so difficult and so risky — the proverbial changing of the front two tires on the car while going down …
SPONSORED If you’ve been living in a world of heavy-duty parallel file systems and scale-out NAS, chances are good you have been there for a while. Decades, perhaps. Back in those far-flung days when scalability meant making trade-offs, when the network was the bottleneck rather than storage, and hard drives …
In an ideal world, there is a balance between compute, network, and storage that allows for the CPUs to be fed with data such that they do not waste too much of their processing capacity spinning empty clocks. System architects try to get as close as they can to the …
COMMISSIONED Software changes like the weather, and hardware changes like the landscape; each affects the other over geologic timescales to create a new climate. And this — largely — explains why it has taken so long for open-source computing to spread its tentacles into the hardware world. With software, all …
The remote procedure call, or RPC, might be the single most important invention in the history of modern computing. The ability to reach out from a running program and activate another set of code to do something — get data or manipulate it in some fashion — is a powerful …
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Supply chains have become so complex and tangled that the traditional way of navigating everything from suppliers, inventory, transportation and analytics has been upended. As with all messes, there is deep commercial opportunity for any company that can handle clean-up in a novel, more streamlined way. In a post-2020 world, …
If there is anything for certain in the business of HPC it’s that building and maintaining a profitable enterprise is tough, even for established supercomputer makers like Cray (later acquired by HPE). Penguin Computing has been no exception but managed to weather its own storms, which included tactics like borrowing …
VMware is a company that has always embraced change. As we have noted before, the company that started off roiling the datacenter with virtualization technology that initially changed the dynamics — from efficiency to flexibility to costs — of servers and eventually expanded to include storage appliance and enterprise networks, …
One of the key strategic moves that AMD made when it architected its comeback in the datacenter was to beef up the compute, I/O, and memory on a single server socket while at the same time making that socket out of chiplets that were significantly cheaper to manufacture and integrate …
While the minimalist server processor — and the microserver concept that was based upon it — did not take over the datacenters of the world, there are still some workloads that can fit in modestly powered single-socket CPUs just fine. That is why Intel has always created server variants of …
These are still early days for quantum computing, far too soon to talk about domain-specific quantum systems. But if there are areas hungrier than ever for what quantum is best at — dense optimization problems at scale — the future cannot arrive fast enough. More specifically, the golden grail for …
Sponsored If you have a hundred or a thousand machines that you want to work in concert to run a simulation or a model or a machine learning training workload that cannot physically be done by any one single machine, you build a distributed systems cluster and there are all …
While we are big fans of distributed computing systems here at The Next Platform, we never forget our heritage in big iron. And we never forget the important place that big, fat, shared memory NUMA systems still play in the spectrum of compute in the datacenter. And we like big …
Enterprises and tech vendors alike for the past few years have been talking about the growing importance of the edge in the increasingly distributed IT environment. It’s at the edge where more data is being generated and stored, and organizations are feeling the need to process, analyze and act on …
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