• Is Open Source The AI Nirvana for Intel?

    April 20, 2018

    Intel has been making some interesting moves in the community space recently, including free licenses for its compiler suite for educators and open source contributors can now be had, as can rotating 90 day licenses for its full System Studio environment for anyone who takes the time to sign up.

    In the AI space, Intel recently announced that its nGraph code for managing AI graph APIs has also been opened to the community. After opening it up last month, Intel has been followed up on the initial work on MXNet with further improvements to TensorFlow.

    The Next Platform …

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  • EU Swaps JuQueen BlueGene/Q For Modular Xeon JUWELS Supercomputer

    April 20, 2018

    The European Union has never been willing to cede the exascale computing race to the United States, Japan, or China.

    In recent years, Europe has ramped up its investments in the HPC space through such programs as Horizon 2020, an effort to grow R&D in Europe, and EuroHPC to drive development of exascale systems, and the Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe (PRACE), which aims to develop a distributed supercomputing infrastructure that will be accessible to researchers, businesses, and academic institutions throughout the EU. The SAGE project will create a multi-tiered storage platform for data-centric exascale computing to enable …

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  • The Contradictions Of IBM’s Platform Strategy

    April 20, 2018

    The thing about platforms that have a wide adoption and deep history is that they tend to persist. They have such economic inertia that, so long as they can keep morphing and grafting on new technologies, that they persist long after alternatives have emerged and dominated data processing. Every company ultimately wants to build a platform for this reason, and has since the dawn of commercial computing, for precisely this reason, for this inertia – it takes too much effort to change or replace it – is what generates the profits.

    It is with this in mind that we contemplate …

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  • Cray’s Ever-Expanding Compute For HPC

    April 19, 2018

    With choice comes complexity, and the Cambrian explosion in compute options is only going to make this harder even if it is a much more satisfying intellectual and financial challenge. This added complexity is worth it because companies will be able to more closely align the hardware to the applications. This is why search engine giant Google has been driving compute diversity and why supercomputer maker Cray has been looking forward to it as well.

    This expanding of the compute ecosystem is also necessary because big jumps in raw compute performance for general purpose processors are possible as they were …

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  • VMware’s Platform Can Only Reflect The Enterprise Datacenter

    April 18, 2018

    When a company has 500,000 enterprise customers that are paying for perpetual licenses and support on systems software – this is an absolutely enormous base by corporate standards, and a retro licensing model straight from the 1980s and 1990s – what does it do for an encore?

    That’s a very good question, and for now the answer for VMware seems to be to sell virtual storage and virtual networking networking to that vast base of virtual compute customers, and take wheelbarrows full of money to the bank on behalf of parent Dell Technologies. Virtualization took root during the Great Recession …

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  • GPUs Mine Astronomical Datasets For Golden Insight Nuggets

    April 16, 2018

    As humankind continues to stare into the dark abyss of deep space in an eternal quest to understand our origins, new computational tools and technologies are needed at unprecedented scales. Gigantic datasets from advanced high resolution telescopes and huge scientific instrumentation installations are overwhelming classical computational and storage techniques.

    This is the key issue with exploring the Universe – it is very, very large. Combining advances in machine learning and high speed data storage are starting to provide hitherto unheard of levels of insight that were previously in the realm of pure science fiction. Using computer systems to infer knowledge …

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  • Another Step In Building The HPC Ecosystem For Arm

    April 16, 2018

    Many of us are impatient for Arm processors to take off in the datacenter in general and in HPC in particular. And ever so slowly, it looks like it is starting to happen.

    Every system buyer wants choice because choice increases competition, which lowers cost and mitigates against risk. But no organization, no matter how large, can afford to build its own software ecosystem. Even the hyperscalers like Google and Facebook, whole literally make money on the apps running on their vast infrastructure, rely heavily on the open source community, taking as much as they give back. So it is …

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  • Building Bigger, Faster GPU Clusters Using NVSwitches

    April 13, 2018 Paul Teich

    Nvidia launched its second-generation DGX system in March. In order to build the 2 petaflops half-precision DGX-2, Nvidia had to first design and build a new NVLink 2.0 switch chip, named NVSwitch. While Nvidia is only shipping NVSwitch as an integral component of its DGX-2 systems today, Nvidia has not precluded selling NVSwitch chips to data center equipment manufacturers.

    This article will answer many of the questions we asked in our first look at the NVSwitch chip, using DGX-2 as an example architecture.

    Nvidia’s NVSwitch is a two-billion transistor non-blocking switch design incorporating 18 complete NVLink 2.0 ports …

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  • The Evolution Of Hyperconverged Storage To Composable Systems

    April 12, 2018

    Hyperconverged infrastructure in some ways is like the credit card in those old TV ads: in this case, it’s everywhere that enterprises want to be. HCI put compute and storage on the same cluster, tightly integrate them with networking and unified management tools and essentially give enterprises a private cloud for the datacenter as well as pushing compute out to the edges in a consistent manner.

    HCI also promises a bunch of other things beneficial to enterprises, including streamlined management, lower costs, faster speeds, and easier scalability than traditional IT systems to better address the rise of cloud computing, analytics, …

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  • HPC Provides Big Bang, But Needs Big Bucks, Too

    April 12, 2018

    Supercomputers keep getting faster, but they are keep getting more expensive. This is a problem, and it is one that is going to eventually affect every kind of computer until we get a new technology that is not based on CMOS chips.

    The general budget and some of the feeds and speeds are out thanks to the requests for proposal for the “Frontier” and “El Capitan” supercomputers that will eventually be built for Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. So now is a good time to take a look at not just the historical performance of capability …

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