• 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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  • Upstart Switch Chip Maker Tears Up The Ethernet Roadmap

    March 21, 2017

    Ethernet switching has its own kinds of Moore’s Law barriers. The transition from 10 Gb/sec to 100 Gb/sec devices over the past decade has been anything but smooth, and a lot of compromises had to be made to even get to the interim – and unusual – 40 Gb/sec stepping stone towards the 100 Gb/sec devices that are ramping today in the datacenter.

    While 10 Gb/sec Ethernet switching is fine for a certain class of enterprise applications that are not bandwidth hungry, for the hyperscalers and cloud builders, 100 Gb/sec is nowhere near enough bandwidth, and 200 Gb/sec, which is …

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  • Japan Keeps Accelerating With Tsubame 3.0 AI Supercomputer

    February 17, 2017

    The Global Scientific Information and Computing Center at the Tokyo Institute of Technology has been at the forefront of accelerated computing, and well before GPUs came along and made acceleration not only cool but affordable and normal. But its latest system, Tsubame 3.0, being installed later this year, the Japanese supercomputing center is going to lay the hardware foundation for a new kind of HPC application that brings together simulation and modeling and machine learning workloads.

    The hot new idea in HPC circles is not just being able to run machine learning workloads side by side with simulations, but to …

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  • What Bellwether Cisco Reveals About Datacenter Spending

    February 16, 2017

    As the world’s dominant supplier of switches and routers into the datacenter and one of the big providers of servers (with a hope of transforming part of that server businesses into a sizeable hyperconverged storage business), Cisco Systems provides a kind of lens into the glass houses of the world. You can see what companies are doing – and what they are not doing – and watch how Cisco reacts to try to give them what they need while trying to extract the maximum profit out of its customers.

    Say what you will, but Cisco has spent the last …

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  • The Case For IBM Buying Nvidia, Xilinx, And Mellanox

    February 7, 2017

    We spend a lot of time contemplating what technologies will be deployed at the heart of servers, storage, and networks and thereby form the foundation of the next successive generations of platforms in the datacenter for running applications old and new. While technology is inherently interesting, we are cognizant of the fact that the companies producing technology need global reach and a certain critical mass.

    It is with this in mind, and as more of a thought experiment than a desire, that we consider the fate of International Business Machines in the datacenter. In many ways, other companies have long …

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