If there is one thing that can be said about modern distributed computing that has held true for three decades now, it is that the closer you get to the core of the datacenter, the beefier the compute tends to be. …
The best way to make a wave is to make a big splash, which is something that Andy Bechtolsheim, perhaps the most famous serial entrepreneur in IT infrastructure, is very good at doing. …
Much of the focus of the recent high-profile budget battle in Washington – and for that matter, many of the financial debates over the past few decades – has been around how much money should go to the military and how much to domestic programs like Social Security and Medicare. …
Computing, which always includes storage and networking, evolves. Just like everything else on Earth. …
The supercomputing business, the upper stratosphere of the much broader high performance computing segment of the IT industry, is without question one of the most exciting areas in data processing and visualization. …
Two important changes to the datacenter are happening in the same year—one on the hardware side, another in software. …
For several years, work has been underway to develop a standard interconnect that can address the increasing speeds in servers driven by the growing use of such accelerators as GPUs and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and the pressures put on memory by the massive amounts of data being generated and bottleneck between the CPUs and the memory. …
It has taken nearly four years for the low end, workhorse machines in IBM’s Power Systems line to be updated, and the long awaited Power9 processors and the shiny new “ZZ” systems have been unveiled. …
The HPC crowd got a little taste of the IBM’s “Nimbus” Power9 processors for scale out systems, juiced by Nvidia “Volta” Tesla GPU accelerators, last December with the Power AC922 system that is the basis of the “Summit” and “Sierra” pre-exascale supercomputers being built by Big Blue for the US Department of Energy. …
The combination of the excitement for new video games, the machine learning software revolution, the buildout of very large supercomputers based on hybrid CPU-GPU architectures, and the mining of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum have combined into a quadruple whammy that is driving Nvidia to new heights for revenues, profits, and market capitalization. …
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