• Making Mainstream Ethernet Switches More Malleable

    August 4, 2017

    While the hyperscalers of the world are pushing the bandwidth envelope and are rolling out 100 Gb/sec gear in their Ethernet switch fabrics and looking ahead to the not-too-distant future when 200 Gb/sec and even 400 Gb/sec will be available, enterprise customers who make up the majority of switch revenues are still using much slower networks, usually 10 Gb/sec and sometimes even 1 Gb/sec, and 100 Gb/sec seems like a pretty big leap.

    That is why Broadcom, which still has the lion’s share of switch ASIC sales in the datacenter, has revved its long-running Trident family of chips, which lead …

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  • How Google Wants To Rewire The Internet

    July 17, 2017

    When all of your business is driven by end users coming to use your applications over the Internet, the network is arguably the most critical part of the infrastructure. That is why search engine and ad serving giant Google, which has expanded out to media serving, hosted enterprise applications, and cloud computing, has put a tremendous amount of investment into creating its own network stack.

    But running a fast, efficient, hyperscale network for internal datacenters is not sufficient for a good user experience, and that is why Google has created a software defined networking stack to do routing over the …

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  • The System Bottleneck Shifts To PCI-Express

    July 14, 2017

    No matter what, system architects are always going to have to contend with one – and possibly more – bottlenecks when they design the machines that store and crunch the data that makes the world go around. These days, there is plenty of compute at their disposal, a reasonable amount of main memory to hang off of it, and both Ethernet and InfiniBand are on the cusp of 200 Gb/sec of performance and not too far away from 400 Gb/sec and even higher bandwidths.

    Now, it looks like the peripheral bus based on the PCI-Express protocol is becoming the bottleneck, …

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  • Ethernet Getting Back On The Moore’s Law Track

    July 10, 2017

    It would be ideal if we lived in a universe where it was possible to increase the capacity of compute, storage, and networking at the same pace so as to keep all three elements expanding in balance. The irony is that over the past two decades, when the industry needed for networking to advance the most, Ethernet got a little stuck in the mud.

    But Ethernet has pulls out of its boots and left them in the swamp and is back to being barefoot again on much more solid ground where it can run faster. The move from 10 Gb/sec …

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  • Using The Network To Break Down Server Silos

    July 10, 2017 Daniel Proch

    Virtual machines and virtual network functions, or VMs and VNFs for short, are the standard compute units in modern enterprise, cloud, and telecommunications datacenters. But varying VM and VNF resource needs as well as networking and security requirements often force IT departments to manage servers in separate silos, each with their own respective capabilities.

    For example, some VMs or VNFs may require a moderate number of vCPU cores and lower I/O bandwidth, while VMs and VNFs associated with real-time voice and video, IoT, and telco applications require a moderate-to-high number of vCPU cores, rich networking services, and high I/O bandwidth, …

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  • InfiniBand And Proprietary Networks Still Rule Real HPC

    June 30, 2017

    With the network comprising as much as a quarter of the cost of a high performance computing system and being absolutely central to the performance of applications running on parallel systems, it is fair to say that the choice of network is at least as important as the choice of compute engine and storage hierarchy. That’s why we like to take a deep dive into the networking trends present in each iteration of the Top 500 supercomputer rankings as they come out.

    It has been a long time since the Top 500 gave a snapshot of pure HPC centers that …

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  • The Memory Scalability At The Heart Of The Machine

    June 15, 2017

    Much has been made of the ability of The Machine, the system with the novel silicon photonics interconnect and massively scalable shared memory pool being developed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, to already address more main memory at once across many compute elements than many big iron NUMA servers. With the latest prototype, which was unveiled last month, the company was able to address a whopping 160 TB of DDR4 memory.

    This is a considerable feat, but HPE has the ability to significantly expand the memory addressability of the platform, using both standard DRAM memory and as lower cost memories such …

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  • First In-Depth Look at Google’s New Second-Generation TPU

    May 17, 2017

    It was only just last month that we spoke with Google distinguished hardware engineer, Norman Jouppi, in depth about the tensor processing unit used internally at the search giant to accelerate deep learning inference, but that device—that first TPU—is already appearing rather out of fashion.

    This morning at the Google’s I/O event, the company stole Nvidia’s recent Volta GPU thunder by releasing details about its second-generation tensor processing unit (TPU), which will manage both training and inference in a rather staggering 180 teraflops system board, complete with custom network to lash several together into “TPU pods” that can deliver Top …

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  • HPC System Delays Stall InfiniBand

    May 6, 2017

    Enterprise spending on servers was a bit soft in the first quarter, as evidenced by the financial results posted by Intel and by its sometime rival IBM, but the hyperscale and HPC markets, at least when it comes to networking, was a bit soft, according to high-end network chip and equipment maker Mellanox Technologies.

    In the first quarter ended March 31, Mellanox had a 4.1 percent revenue decline, to $188.7 million, and because of higher research and development costs, presumably associated with the rollout of 200 Gb/sec Quantum InfiniBand technology (which the company has talked about) and …

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  • Lessons Learned From Facebook’s Split Network Backbone

    May 2, 2017

    Distributed applications, whether they are containerized or not, have a lot of benefits when it comes to modularity and scale. But in a world of feature creep on all applications, whether they are internally facing ones running a business or hyperscale consumer applications like Google’s search engine or Facebook’s social media network, these distributed applications put a huge strain on the network.

    This, more than any other factor, is why network costs are rising faster than any other aspect of the datacenter. Gone are the days when everything was done in three or four tiers, with a Web server like …

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