• One Hyperscaler Gets The Jump On Skylake, Everyone Else Sidelined

    June 7, 2017

    Well, it could have been a lot worse. About 5.6 percent worse, if you do the math.

    As we here at The Next Platform have been anticipating for quite some time, with so many stars aligning here in 2017 and a slew of server processor and GPU coprocessor announcements and deliveries expected starting in the summer and rolling into the fall, there is indeed a slowdown in the server market and one that savvy customers might be able to take advantage of. But we thought those on the bleeding edge of performance were going to wait to see what Intel, …

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  • When No One Can Make Money In Systems

    June 6, 2017

    Making money in the information technology market has always been a challenge, but it keeps getting increasingly difficult as the tumultuous change in how companies consume compute, storage, and networking rips through all aspects of this $3 trillion market.

    It is tough to know exactly what do to, and we see companies chasing the hot new things, doing acquisitions to bolster their positions, and selling off legacy businesses to generate the cash to do the deals and to keep Wall Street at bay. Companies like IBM, Dell, HPE, and Lenovo have sold things off and bought other things to try …

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  • HPE Looks Ahead To Composable Infrastructure, Persistent Memory

    June 6, 2017

    Over the past several years, the server market has been roiled by the rise of cloud computing that run the applications created by companies and by services offered by hyperscalers that augment or replace such applications. This is a tougher and lumpier market, to be sure.

    The top tier cloud providers like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google not only have become key drivers in server sales but also have turned to original design manufacturers (ODMs) from Taiwan and China for lower cost systems to help populate their massive datacenters. Overall, global server shipments have slowed, and top-tier OEMs are working to …

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  • The Last Itanium, At Long Last

    May 23, 2017

    In a world of survival of the fittest coupled with mutations, something always has to be the last of its kind. And so it is with the “Kittson” Itanium 9700 processors, which Intel quietly released earlier this month and which will mostly see action in the last of the Integrity line of midrange and high-end systems from Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

    The Itanium line has a complex history, perhaps fitting for a computing architecture that was evolving from the 32-bit X86 architecture inside of Intel and that was taken in a much more experimental and bold direction when the aspiring server …

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  • Some Surprises in the 2018 DoE Budget for Supercomputing

    May 23, 2017

    The US Department of Energy fiscal year 2018 budget request is in. While it reflects much of what we might expect in pre-approval format in terms of forthcoming supercomputers in particular, there are some elements that strike us as noteworthy.

    In the just-released 2018 FY budget request from Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR), page eight of the document states that “The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility will operate Mira (at 10 petaflops) and Theta (at 8.5 petaflops) for existing users, while turning focus to site preparations for deployment of an exascale system of novel architecture.”

    Notice anything missing in this description? …

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  • Under The Hood Of Google’s TPU2 Machine Learning Clusters

    May 22, 2017 Paul Teich

    As we previously reported, Google unveiled its second-generation TensorFlow Processing Unit (TPU2) at Google I/O last week. Google calls this new generation “Google Cloud TPUs”, but provided very little information about the TPU2 chip and the systems that use it other than to provide a few colorful photos. Pictures do say more than words, so in this article we will dig into the photos and provide our thoughts based the pictures and on the few bits of detail Google did provide.

    To start with, it is unlikely that Google will sell TPU-based chips, boards, or servers – TPU2 …

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  • FPGA Startup Gathers Funding Force for Merged Hyperscale Inference

    May 22, 2017

    Around this time last year, we delved into a new FPGA-based architecture that targeted efficient, scalable machine learning inference from startup DeePhi Tech. The company just rounded out its first funding effort with an undisclosed sum with major investors, including Banyan Capital and as we learned this week, FPGA maker Xilinx.

    As that initial article details, the Stanford and Tsinghua University-fed research focused on network pruning and compression at low precision with a device that could be structured for low latency and custom memory allocations. These efforts were originally built on Xilinx FPGA hardware and given this first round of …

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  • Big Bang For The Buck Jump With Volta DGX-1

    May 19, 2017

    One of the reasons why Nvidia has been able to quadruple revenues for its Tesla accelerators in recent quarters is that it doesn’t just sell raw accelerators as well as PCI-Express cards, but has become a system vendor in its own right through its DGX-1 server line. The company has also engineered new adapter cards specifically aimed at hyperscalers who want to crank up the performance on their machine learning inference workloads with a cheaper and cooler Volts GPU.

    Nvidia does not break out revenues for the DGX-1 line separately from other Tesla and GRID accelerator product sales, but we …

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  • AMD Disrupts The Two-Socket Server Status Quo

    May 17, 2017

    It is funny to think that Advanced Micro Devices has been around almost as long as the IBM System/360 mainframe and that it has been around since the United States landed people on the moon. The company has gone through many gut-wrenching transformations, adapting to changing markets. Like IBM and Apple, just to name two, AMD has had its share of disappointments and near-death experiences, but unlike Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, Sequent Computer, Data General, Tandem Computer, and Digital Equipment, it has managed to stay independent and live to fight another day.

    AMD wants a second chance in the datacenter, …

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  • The Embiggening Bite That GPUs Take Out Of Datacenter Compute

    May 16, 2017

    We are still chewing through all of the announcements and talk at the GPU Technology Conference that Nvidia hosted in its San Jose stomping grounds last week, and as such we are thinking about the much bigger role that graphics processors are playing in datacenter compute – a realm that has seen five decades of dominance by central processors of one form or another.

    That is how CPUs got their name, after all. And perhaps this is a good time to remind everyone that systems used to be a collection of different kinds of compute, and that is why the …

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