AMD is definitely on a roll in the United States for pre-exascale and future exascale systems, having won the deals at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab with the “Perlmutter” system, at Oak Ridge National laboratory with the “Frontier” system, and as the presumed front runner at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory with the “El Capitan” system. …
The dividing lines between system buses, system intraconnects, and system interconnects are getting more blurry all the time. …
The speed bumps with switch ASICs are coming fast and furious these days, and the datacenter is no longer dominated by the big switch incumbents such as Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks, which made their own chips, switches, and operating systems, and the networking divisions of server OEMs like Dell and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which made some of their own gear – including ASICs – and acquired other companies to help build out their networking businesses – who sometimes also did their own ASICs. …
The apocryphal Chinese curse – “May you live in interesting times” – certainly applies to the datacenter of the early 21st century. …
Under most circumstances, the major public cloud builders would like to use their own iron in their datacenters. …
Even before it launched a $1.3 billion acquisition of Cray back in May, Hewlett Packard Enterprise has had exascale aspirations. …
It had to happen sooner or later, and really, the wonder is that it hasn’t already happened, given the nature of the infrastructure buildouts at hyperscalers and cloud builders, the skittishness of enterprises due to the trade war between the United States and China, the uncertainty in Europe over the British exit, and general concern with macroeconomic issues because it has now been almost twelve years since the last recession. …
It would be convenient for everyone – chip makers and those who are running machine learning workloads – if training and inference could be done on the same device. …
If you think about it for a minute, it is amazing that any of the old-time IT suppliers, like IBM and Hewlett Packard, and to a certain extent now Microsoft and Dell, have persisted in the datacenter for decades or, in the case of Big Blue, for more than a century. …
It has been a long time coming, and it might have been better if this had been done a decade ago. …
All Content Copyright The Next Platform