Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Casing The HPC Market Is Hard, And Getting Harder
June 22, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Markets are always changing. Sometimes information technology is replaced by a new thing, and sometimes it morphs from one thing to another so gradually that is just becomes computing or networking or storage as we know it. For instance, in the broadest sense, all infrastructure will be cloudy, even if it is bare metal machines or those using containers or heavier server virtualization. In a similar way, in the future all high performance computing may largely be a kind of artificial intelligence, bearing little resemblance to the crunch-heavy simulations we are used to.
It has taken two decades for cloud …
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Thinking Through The Cognitive HPC Nexus With Big Blue
June 21, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There are plenty of things that the members of the high performance community do not agree on, there is a growing consensus that machine learning applications will at least in some way be part of the workflow at HPC centers that do traditional simulation and modeling.
Some HPC vendors think the HPC and AI systems have either already converged or will soon do so, and others think that the performance demands (both in terms of scale and in time to result) on both HPC and AI will necessitate radically different architectures and therefore distinct systems for these two workloads. IBM, …
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Competition Returns To X86 Servers In Epyc Fashion
June 20, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
AMD has been absent from the X86 server market for so long that many of us have gotten into the habit of only speaking about the Xeon server space and how it relates to the relatively modest (in terms of market share, not in terms of architecture and capability) competition that Intel has faced in the past eight years.
Those days are over now that AMD has successfully got its first X86 server chip out the door with the launch of the “Naples” chip, the first in a line of processors that will carry the Epyc brand and, if all …
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AMD Winds Up One-Two Compute Punch For Servers
June 19, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
While AMD voluntarily exited the server processor arena in the wake of Intel’s onslaught with the “Nehalem” Xeon processors during the Great Recession, it never stopped innovating with its graphics processors and it kept enough of a hand in smaller processors used in consumer and selected embedded devices to start making money again in PCs and to take the game console business away from IBM’s Power chip division.
Now, after five long years of investing, AMD is poised to get its act together and to storm the glass house with a new line of server processors based on its Zen …
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Cray CTO On The Cambrian Compute Explosion
June 19, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
What goes around comes around. After fighting so hard to drive volume economics in the HPC arena with relatively inexpensive X86 clusters in the past twenty years, those economies of scale are running out of gas. That is why we are seeing an explosion in the diversity of compute, not just on the processor, but in adjunct computing elements that make a processor look smarter than it really is.
The desire of system architects to try everything because it is fun has to be counterbalanced by a desire to make systems that can be manufactured at a price that is …
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HPC Poised For Big Changes, Top To Bottom
June 19, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There is a lot of change coming down the pike in the high performance computing arena, but it has not happened as yet and that is reflected in the current Top 500 rankings of supercomputers in the world. But the June 2017 list gives us a glimpse into the future, which we think will be as diverse and contentious from an architectural standpoint as in the past.
No one architecture is winning and taking all, and many different architectures are getting a piece of the budget action. This means HPC is a healthy and vibrant ecosystem and not, like enterprise …
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The Memory Scalability At The Heart Of The Machine
June 15, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Much has been made of the ability of The Machine, the system with the novel silicon photonics interconnect and massively scalable shared memory pool being developed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, to already address more main memory at once across many compute elements than many big iron NUMA servers. With the latest prototype, which was unveiled last month, the company was able to address a whopping 160 TB of DDR4 memory.
This is a considerable feat, but HPE has the ability to significantly expand the memory addressability of the platform, using both standard DRAM memory and as lower cost memories such …
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Clever RDMA Technique Delivers Distributed Memory Pooling
June 12, 2017 Agam Shah
More databases and data stores and the applications that run atop them are moving to in-memory processing, and sometimes the memory capacity in a single big iron NUMA server isn’t enough and the latencies across a cluster of smaller nodes are too high for decent performance.
For example, server memory capacity tops out at 48 TB in the Superdome X server and at 64 TB in the UV 300 server from Hewlett Packard Enterprise using NUMA architectures. HPE’s latest iteration of the The Machine packs 160 TB of shared memory capacity across its nodes, and has an early version of …
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The Composable Systems Wave Is Rising
June 8, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Hardware is, by its very nature, physical and therefore, unlike software or virtual hardware and software routines encoded by FPGAs, it is the one thing that cannot be easily changed. The dream of composable systems, which we have discussed in the past, is something that has been swirling around in the heads of system architects for more than a decade, and we are without question getting closer to realizing the dream of making the components of systems and the clusters that are created from them programmable like software.
The hyperscalers, of course, have been on the bleeding edge of …
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One Hyperscaler Gets The Jump On Skylake, Everyone Else Sidelined
June 7, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Well, it could have been a lot worse. About 5.6 percent worse, if you do the math.
As we here at The Next Platform have been anticipating for quite some time, with so many stars aligning here in 2017 and a slew of server processor and GPU coprocessor announcements and deliveries expected starting in the summer and rolling into the fall, there is indeed a slowdown in the server market and one that savvy customers might be able to take advantage of. But we thought those on the bleeding edge of performance were going to wait to see what Intel, …
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