When we broke the news about the upcoming Intel and Cray contract for the Aurora supercomputer coming to Argonne National Laboratory in 2018, we talked in depth about the unique Knights Hill based architecture of the future machine and referenced a new paradigm for high-end HPC systems that Intel refers to as the HPC scalable system framework. …
IBM finalized the spinoff of its System x X86 server business to Lenovo Group back in October, and the first quarter of 2015 is the first glimpse that we have of a Big Blue that is focused solely on its Power Systems and System z mainframes. …
Architects are optimists. In the computer industry, particularly within the HPC community, there is a small cadre of technologists who have the intellectual horsepower, vision and decades of experience to build wholly new system designs. …
There is not really an Ethernet switch market so much as several distinct ones, aimed at customers who need different combinations of bandwidth and latency in their networks and who also upgrade their networks at different paces. …
AMD doesn’t talk much about servers these days, but it looks like the company is getting ready to revamp its server component business just as it is shutting down its SeaMicro unit. …
Intel’s decades-long hard work in vanquishing most of the competing processor architectures from most of the workloads in the datacenter is paying off. …
In the story we broke this morning about the forthcoming “Aurora” supercomputer set to be installed at Argonne National Laboratory—one of three pre-exascale machines that were part of the CORAL procurement between three national labs–we speculated that unlike the other two machines, which will be based on an OpenPower approach (Power9, Volta GPUs, and a new interconnect), the architecture of this system would be based on the third generation Knights family of chips from Intel, the Knights Hill processors. …
Drawing the lines where the server ends and the network begins is getting more and more difficult. …
Try as it may, Ethernet cannot kill InfiniBand. For the foreseeable future, the very high-end of the server, storage, and database cluster spaces will need a network interconnect that can deliver the same or better bandwidth at lower latency than can Ethernet gear. …
Except for some edge cases where extreme low-latency or high bandwidth is absolutely required, the Ethernet protocol absolutely rules networking in the datacenter, around the campus, and in our homes. …
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