Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Streamlining Medical Research With Machine Learning
August 21, 2017 Vineeth Ram
In this fast-paced global economy, enhanced speed, productivity, and intelligence are more important than ever to success. Machines are now being leveraged to augment human capabilities in order to drive business growth or accelerate innovation. Businesses need leading-edge IT to achieve superhuman levels of performance.
Today’s enterprises and organizations are deploying high performance computing (HPC) technologies to reach the new frontier of IT intelligence. Backed by HPC solutions, users can leverage artificial intelligence (AI) tools to predict and solve problems in real time, streamline IT operations, and drive more informed, data-driven decision-making.
Utilizing Innovative AI Tools
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How To Do Stateless Compute, Clustered Storage Like A Hyperscaler
August 17, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There are so many companies that claim that their storage systems are inspired by those that have been created by the hyperscalers – particularly Google and Facebook – that it is hard to keep track of them all.
But if we had to guess, and we do because the search engine giant has never revealed the nitty gritty on the hardware architecture and software stack underpinning its storage, we would venture that the foundation of the current Google File System and its Colossus successor looks a lot like what storage upstart Datrium has finally, after many years of development, brought …
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Where Serverless And Event Driven Computing Collide
August 16, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Every new paradigm of computing has its own framework, and it is the adoption of that framework that usually makes it consumable for the regular enterprises that don’t have fleets of PhDs on hand to create their own frameworks before a technology is mature.
Serverless computing – something that strikes fear in the hearts of many whose living is dependent on the vast inefficiencies that still lurk in the datacenter – and event-driven computing are two different and often associated technologies where the frameworks are still evolving.
The serverless movement, which we have discussed before in analyzing the Lambda efforts …
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How Hardware Drives The Shape Of Databases To Come
August 15, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
One of the reasons that the University of California at Berkeley was been a hotbed of software technology back in the 1970s and 1980s is Michael Stonebraker, who was one of the pioneers in relational database technology and one of the industry’s biggest – and most vocal – shakers and movers and one of its most prolific serial entrepreneurs.
Like other database pioneers, Stonebraker read the early relational data model papers by IBMer Edgar Codd, and in 1973 started work on the Ingres database along IBM’s own System R database, which eventually became DB2, and Oracle’s eponymous database, which entered …
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The Ironic – And Fleeting – Volatility In NVM Storage
August 14, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There is no question any longer that flash memory has found its place – in fact, many places – in the datacenter, even though the debate is still raging about when or if solid state memory will eventually replace disk drives in all datacenters of the world.
Sometime between tomorrow and never is a good guess.
Flash is still a hot commodity, so much so that the slower-than-expected transition to 3D NAND has caused a shortage in supply that is driving up the price of enterprise-grade flash – unfortunately at the same time that memory makers are having trouble cranking …
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Nvidia Is A Textbook Case Of Sowing And Reaping Markets
August 11, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In a properly working capitalist economy, innovative companies make big bets, help create new markets, vanquish competition or at least hold it at bay, and profit from all of the hard work, cleverness, luck, and deal making that comes with supplying a good or service to demanding customers.
There is no question that Nvidia has become a textbook example of this as it helped create and is now benefitting from the wave of accelerated computing that is crashing into the datacenters of the world. The company is on a roll, and is on the very laser-sharp cutting edge of its …
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Fujitsu Bets On Deep Learning And HPC Divergence
August 9, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
One of the luckiest coincidences in the past decade has been that the hybrid machines designed for traditional HPC simulation and modeling workloads. which combine the serial processing performance of CPUs and the parallel processing and massive memory bandwidth of GPUs, were also well suited to run machine learning training applications.
If the HPC community had not made the investments in hybrid architectures, the hyperscalers and their massive machine learning operations, which drive just about all aspects of their businesses these days, would not have seen such stellar results. (And had that not happened, many of us would have had …
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The Shape Of AMD HPC And AI Iron To Come
August 8, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
In the IT business, just like any other business, you have to try to sell what is on the truck, not what is planned to be coming out of the factories in the coming months and years. AMD has put a very good X86 server processor into the market for the first time in nine years, and it also has a matching GPU that gives its OEM and ODM partners a credible alternative for HPC and AI workload to the combination of Intel Xeons and Nvidia Teslas that dominate hybrid computing these days.
There are some pretty important caveats to …
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Drilling Down Into The Xeon Skylake Architecture
August 4, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The “Skylake” Xeon SP processors from Intel have been in the market for nearly a month now, and we thought it would be a good time to drill down into the architecture of the new processor. We also want to see what the new Xeon SP has to offer for HPC, AI, and enterprise customers as well as compare the new X86 server motor to prior generations of Xeons and alternative processors in the market that are vying for a piece of the datacenter action.
That’s a lot, and we relish it. So let’s get started with a deep dive …
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Making Mainstream Ethernet Switches More Malleable
August 4, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
While the hyperscalers of the world are pushing the bandwidth envelope and are rolling out 100 Gb/sec gear in their Ethernet switch fabrics and looking ahead to the not-too-distant future when 200 Gb/sec and even 400 Gb/sec will be available, enterprise customers who make up the majority of switch revenues are still using much slower networks, usually 10 Gb/sec and sometimes even 1 Gb/sec, and 100 Gb/sec seems like a pretty big leap.
That is why Broadcom, which still has the lion’s share of switch ASIC sales in the datacenter, has revved its long-running Trident family of chips, which lead …
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