Open source software has done a lot to transform the IT industry, but perhaps more than anything else it has reminded those who architect complex systems that all elements of a datacenter have to be equally open and programmable for them to make the customizations that are necessary to run specific workloads efficiently and therefore cost effectively. …
There are two competing trends in platform designs that architects always have to contend with. …
One of the things that high-end network adapter and switch maker Mellanox Technologies got through its $811 million acquisition of network processing chip maker EZchip last September was a team that was well versed in massively parallel processor chip design, and one that could make Mellanox a potential player in the server chip space. …
While legacy monolithic applications will linger in virtual machines for an incredibly long time in the datacenter, new scale-out applications run best on new architectures. …
Accelerators and coprocessors are proliferating in the datacenter, and it has been a boon for speeding up certain kinds of workloads and, in many cases, making machine learning or simulation jobs possible at scale for the first time. …
The strong interest in deep learning neural networks lies in the ability of neural networks to solve complex pattern recognition tasks – sometimes better than humans. …
One of the breakthrough moments in computing, which was compelled by necessity, was the advent of symmetric multiprocessor, or SMP, clustering to make two or more processors look and act, as far as the operating system and applications were concerned, as a single, more capacious processor. …
Convergence is a recurring theme in all kinds of layers of the datacenter these days. …
There is never enough bandwidth in a datacenter that is the size of a football field and that is expected to work more or less like a single computer. …
It has been a long time since the dominant architecture in the datacenter has been monolithic systems running siloed applications fed by a three tier network. …
All Content Copyright The Next Platform