Compute
The Interplay Of GDP, Inflation, And IT Spending
Data changes behavior and behavior changes data. It is a phenomenon that is akin to the Observer Effect in physics in that you can’t observe something without changing its behavior. …
Connect
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Crafting A DGX-Alike AI Server Out Of AMD GPUs And PCI Switches
Not everybody can afford an Nvidia DGX AI server loaded up with the latest “Hopper” H100 GPU accelerators or even one of its many clones available from the OEMs and ODMs of the world. …
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Ethernet Consortium Shoots For 1 Million Node Clusters That Beat InfiniBand
Here we go again. Some big hyperscalers and cloud builders and their ASIC and switch suppliers are unhappy about Ethernet, and rather than wait for the IEEE to address issues, they are taking matters in their own hands to create what will ultimately become an IEEE standard that moves Ethernet forward in a direction and speed of their choosing. …
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PCI-Express Must Match The Cadence Of Compute Engines And Networks
When system architects sit down to design their next platforms, they start by looking at a bunch of roadmaps from suppliers of CPUs, accelerators, memory, flash, network interface cards – and PCI-Express controllers and switches. …
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Photonics To Make Celestial HBM3 Memory Fabric
There is no shortage of silicon photonics technologies under development, and every few months it seems like another startup crops up promising massive bandwidth, over longer distances, while using less power than copper interconnects. …
AI
Cisco Guns For InfiniBand With Silicon One G200
It was a fortuitous coincidence that Nvidia was already working on massively parallel GPU compute engines for doing calculations in HPC simulations and models when the machine learning tipping point happened, and similarly, it was fortunate for InfiniBand that it had the advantage of high bandwidth, low latency, and remote direct memory access across GPUs at that same moment. …
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Ethernet Switching Still Booming As Routing Soldiers On
If the datacenter is the computer – and it certainly is for hundreds of companies comprising somewhere well north of half of server sales worldwide – then the Ethernet fabric, consisting of switches and routers, is the backplane of that computer. …
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Rest In Pieces: Servers And CXL
If you had to rank the level of hype around specific datacenter technologies, the top thing these days would be, without question, generative AI, probably followed by AI training and inference of all kinds and mixed precision computing in general. …
AI
Nvidia Hints At Upcoming AI-Focused Spectrum-4 Ethernet
It is no surprise at all that Nvidia’s datacenter business is making money hang over fist right now as generative AI makes machine learning a household word and is giving us something akin to a Dot Com Boom in the glass houses of the world. …
AI
The Future Of AI Training Demands Optical Interconnects
Artificial intelligence has taken the datacenter by storm, and it is forcing companies to rethink the balance between compute, storage, and networking. …