IBM Bookends AI With New Accelerated Power9 System
Like the large enterprises they sell gear to, the big OEMs are a conservative lot and they take a paced, methodical approach to introducing new technologies into the datacenter. …
Like the large enterprises they sell gear to, the big OEMs are a conservative lot and they take a paced, methodical approach to introducing new technologies into the datacenter. …
Big Blue has become a big believer in using differential signaling to attach everything – and we mean everything – to the processor. …
Sometimes, a workload needs more memory, more compute, or more I/O than is available in the two socket server that has been the standard pretty much since the dot-com boom two decades ago. …
The Barcelona Supercomputing Center is one of the flagship HPC facilities in Europe and it arguably has the most elegant and spiritual of datacenters in the world, located inside of Torre Girona Chapel. …
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. …
It has taken nearly four years for the low end, workhorse machines in IBM’s Power Systems line to be updated, and the long awaited Power9 processors and the shiny new “ZZ” systems have been unveiled. …
The HPC crowd got a little taste of the IBM’s “Nimbus” Power9 processors for scale out systems, juiced by Nvidia “Volta” Tesla GPU accelerators, last December with the Power AC922 system that is the basis of the “Summit” and “Sierra” pre-exascale supercomputers being built by Big Blue for the US Department of Energy. …
In a way, the processor market started moving in slow motion through 2017 as server makers and their customers were awaiting a veritable cornucopia of processor options, something the industry has not seen in many a year. …
The differences between peak theoretical computing capacity of a system and the actual performance it delivers can be stark. …
The server race is really afoot now that IBM has finally gotten off the starting blocks with its first Power9 system, based on its “Nimbus” variant of that processor and turbocharged with the latest “Volta” Tesla GPU accelerators from Nvidia and EDR InfiniBand networks from Mellanox Technologies. …
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