It is not every day that you see the titans of some of the biggest hyperscalers share the same stage, and even less likely that the companies that pride themselves on having bootstrapped their own infrastructure because they can do it better than the vendor community at their massive scale would agree on setting standards together. …
A year ago, at the Open Compute Summit, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, which was not even called that yet, unveiled its bare-bones, vanity free, hyperscale-class Cloudline server lineup, which had the double-edged task of keeping the company selling minimalist machines in China in conjunction with manufacturing partner Foxconn while at the same time giving HPE a chance to defend against the unrelenting pressure of the handful of original design manufacturers (ODMs) that want to topple the world’s largest server maker from its perch. …
Back in the early 1990s, the common view was that there was little money to be made in the business of open source. …
If there has been a time when the IT industry was not being roiled by multiple transitions, we can’t remember it. …
It is convenient, perhaps, that large scale computing evolved just about the time the easiest and biggest strikes for oil and natural gas were over. …
The convergence of servers and networks forced the hand of networking giant Cisco Systems back in the late 2000s, compelling it to create the Unified Computing System blade servers and their integrated networking and launch them nearly seven years ago now, upsetting the balance of power in the datacenter. …
Well before the Intel acquisition of Altera and the news about Microsoft’s use of the Catapult servers, which feature FPGAs to power their Bing search engine and other key applications, it has been clear that the FPGA future is just starting to unfold. …
As the shift in high performance computing has taken an efficient data-intensive supercomputing turn in recent years, fundamental rethinks in architecture are coming to the fore. …
Just because computing and storage are commodities does not mean, by any stretch of the imagination, that they are inexpensive. …
One of the first Knights Landing, Omni-Path supercomputers will be hitting the floor in Colorado in the coming months, and while one of the lead decision-makers for the system says they are expecting to see it in May (well ahead of when Knights Landing and Omni-Path were expected to appear, even for early ship programs), that buffer time provides a chance to make the necessary tweaks and optimizations to ensure that a scientific computing software stack is primed and ready for the changes Omni-Path in particular will bring about. …
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