Timothy Prickett Morgan
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The Huge Premium Intel Is Charging For Skylake Xeons
September 1, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There is no question that Intel has reached its peak in the datacenter when it comes to compute. For years now, it has had very little direct competition and only some indirect competition for the few remaining RISC upstarts and the threat of the newbies with their ARM architectures.
The question now, as we ponder the “Skylake” Xeon SP processors and their “Purley” platform that launched in July, is this: Is Intel at a local maximum, with another peak off in the distance, perhaps after a decline or perhaps after steady growth or a flat spot, or is this the …
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Kafka Wakes Up And Is Metamorphosed Into A Database
August 30, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Sometimes a database is like a collection of wax tablets that you can stack and sort through to update, and these days, sometimes it is more like a river that has a shape defined by its geography but it is constantly changing and flowing and that flow, more than anything else, defines the information that drives the business. There is no time to persist it, organize it, and then query it.
In this case, embedding a database right in that stream makes good sense, and that is precisely what Confluent, the company that has commercialized Apache Kafka, which is a …
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VMware’s Platform Revolves Around ESXi, Except Where It Can’t
August 29, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Building a platform is hard enough, and there are very few companies that can build something that scales, supports a diversity of applications, and, in the case of either cloud providers or software or whole system sellers, can be suitable for tens of thousands, much less hundreds of thousands or millions, of customers.
But if building a platform is hard, keeping it relevant is even harder, and those companies who demonstrate the ability to adapt quickly and to move to new ground while holding old ground are the ones that get to make money and wield influence in the datacenter. …
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The Rise Of The Fourth Wave Of Computing
August 28, 2017 Nick Tausanovitch
According to a recent Jefferies report, the fourth wave of computing has started and it is being driven by the adoption of IoT with parallel processing as the solution. Tectonic shifts in computing have been caused by major forces dating back to the 1960s.
With each shift, new solution providers have emerged as prominent suppliers. The latest power often cited with the fourth wave is Nvidia and its parallel processing platform for HPC and artificial intelligence (AI), namely GPUs and the CUDA programming platform. The growth of the data center segment of Nvidia’s business – from $339 million in …
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Drilling Into Microsoft’s BrainWave Soft Deep Learning Chip
August 24, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
There are a lot of different ways to skin the deep learning cat. But for hyperscalers and cloud providers who want to use a single platform internally as well as providing deep learning services to customers externally, they really want to have as few different architectures as possible in their datacenters to maximize efficiencies and to lower both capital and operational costs. This is particularly true when the hyperscaler is also a cloud provider.
If Moore’s Law had not run out of gas – or at least shifted to lower octane fuel – then the choice would have been easy. …
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ARM Servers: Qualcomm Is Now A Contender
August 23, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Many have tried to wrench the door of the datacenter open with ARM processors, but Qualcomm, which knows a thing or two about creating and selling chips for smartphones and other client devices, has perhaps the best chance of actually selling ARM chips in volume inside of servers.
The combination of a rich and eager target market with a good product design tailored for that market and enough financial strength and stability to ensure many generations of development are what are necessary to break into the datacenter, and the “Falkor” cores that were unveiled this week at Hot Chips were …
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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.
Machine learning, a powerful subset of …
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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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