While enterprise spending on general purpose servers has been soft in recent quarters, companies are investing more heavily in certain segments, and one of them just so happens to be high performance computing systems used for simulation, modeling, and data analytics at scale. …
Even though Intel is best known in the datacenter as the maker of server processors and their chipsets, the company has increasingly become a platform thinker in the past decade. …
The natural place for Intel to launch the next iteration of its “Knights” family of parallel X86 processors is at one of the two major supercomputer conferences that are hosted each year, which is the ISC conference in Germany and the SC conference in the United States. …
The hardware part of the high performance computing market is somewhere around $10 billion or so, depending on how you want to count it and who you want to ask, and Bill Mannel, vice president and general manager of a combined HPC and Big Data group within the newly constituted Hewlett Packard Enterprise half of the former Hewlett-Packard, reckons that his employer has north of a third of the business. …
IBM did not just stake the future of its Power chip and the systems business on which it depends on the OpenPower Foundation, a consortium now with 160 members after more than two years of cultivation by Big Blue and its key early partners – Google, Nvidia, Mellanox Technologies, and Tyan. …
Online auctioneer eBay was founded a year after Amazon and is older than Google, Facebook, and a number of the other hyperscalers. …
One of the key themes to improving the performance of clusters running simulations has been the offloading of common routines from the central processors in the servers to accelerators in the network adapter cards that plug into the servers and that interface with switches. …
These are exciting times for the memory hierarchy in systems. New kinds of DRAM and non-volatile memories are becoming available to system architects to enhance the performance and responsiveness of the applications that run upon them. …
The progression in performance per watt for Nvidia’s Tesla line of GPU coprocessors is continuing apace now that the graphics chip maker is delivering two shiny new devices based on its “Maxwell” generation of chips. …
Object storage is not a new technology, but it is something that many enterprises are just starting to adopt as they follow the hyperscalers and HPC centers away from the overhead and scalability limits of traditional storage and its file systems. …
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