Barefoot Networks is on a mission, and it is a simple one: To give datacenter switches the same kind of openness and programmability that X86 servers have enjoyed for decades in the datacenter. …
The “Great Lakes” supercomputer at the University of Michigan is the first cluster in the world to make use of 200 Gb/sec HDR InfiniBand switching from Mellanox Technology, which is sold under the Quantum brand. …
The twice-annual ranking of distributed computing systems based on the Linpack parallel Fortran benchmark, a widely used and sometimes maligned test, is as much a history lesson as it is an expectation always looking forward, with anticipation, to the next performance milestones in high performance computing. …
Having multiple related but distinct product lines turns a company into an economic engine that runs a lot smoother than an it would run with a single cylinder. …
People have been talking about software defined networking and its related network function virtualization for so long that it must appear to many organizations that everyone else is doing it. …
NVM-Express has been creating a quiet revolution in servers for several years now, providing a way for flash storage to bypass the traditional storage stack and the limitations of interfaces such as SATA and SAS, and instead pipe data directly into and out of the CPU through the high-speed PCI Express bus. …
While processors and now GPUs tend to get all of the glory when it comes to high performance computing, for the past three decades as distributed computing architectures became the norm in supercomputing, it has been the interconnects that made all the difference in how well – or poorly – these systems perform. …
For the past five years, supercomputer maker Cray has been diligently at work not only creating a new system architecture that allows for a mix of different interconnects and compute for its future “Shasta” systems, but has also brought long-time Cray chief technology officer, Steve Scott, back into the company after two stints spent at Nvidia and Google to create a new interconnect, called “Slingshot,” that is the beating heart of the Shasta system and that signals a return of the Cray that we know and love. …
The appetite for network bandwidth is insatiable, as is that of compute and storage, but our enthusiasm to acquire larger and larger chunks of all of these things is curtailed significantly by cost. …
It is hard to say for sure, but there is probably as much aggregate computing capacity in the academic supercomputing centers of the world as there are in the big national labs. …
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