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. …
Co-design is all the rage these days in systems design, where the hardware and software components of a system – whether it is aimed at compute, storage, or networking – are designed in tandem, not one after the other, and immediately affect how each aspect of a system are ultimate crafted. …
Compute is being embedded in everything, and there is another wave of distributed computing pushing out from the datacenter into all kinds of network, storage, and other kinds of devices that collect and process data in their own right as well as passing it back up to the glass house for final processing and permanent storage. …
In a way, the processor market started moving in slow motion through 2017 as server makers and their customers were awaiting a veritable cornucopia of processor options, something the industry has not seen in many a year. …
The Carlyle Group, the publicly traded investment firm that has invested in nearly 300 companies that have a net worth of $170 billion and which itself could make around $4 billion in management fees and income from those investments for 2017, does not invest in any technology lightly. …
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