• Docker Inevitably Embraces Kubernetes Container Orchestration

    April 17, 2018

    Sometimes you can beat them, and sometimes you can join them. If you are Docker, the commercial entity behind the Docker container runtime and a stack of enterprise-class software that wraps around it, and you are facing the rising popularity of the Kubernetes container orchestrator open sourced by Google, you can do both. And so, even though it has its own Swarm orchestration layer, Docker is embracing Kubernetes as a peer to Swarm in its own stack.

    This is not an either/or proposition, and in fact, the way that the company has integrated Kubernetes inside of Docker Enterprise Edition, the …

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  • Refreshing Approaches to Workflow Automation

    April 5, 2018

    Workflow automation has been born of necessity and has evolved an increasingly sophisticated set of tools to manage the growing complexity of the automation itself.

    The same theme keeps emerging across the broader spectrum of enterprise and research IT. For instance, we spoke recently about the need to profile software and algorithms when billions of events per iteration are generated from modern GPU systems. This is a similar challenge and fortunately, not all traditional or physical business processes fall into this scale bucket. Many are much less data intensive, but can have a such a critical impact in “time to …

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  • An Inside Look at What Powers Microsoft’s Internal Systems for AI R&D

    March 28, 2018

    For those who might expect Microsoft to favor its own Windows-centric platforms and tools to power comprehensive infrastructure for serving AI compute and software services for internal R&D groups, plan on being surprised.

    While Microsoft does rely on some core windows features and certainly its Azure cloud services, much of its infrastructure is powered by a broad suite of open source tools. As Jim Jernigan, senior R&D systems engineer at Microsoft Research told us at the GPU Technology Conference (GTC18) this week, the highest volume of workloads running on the diverse research clusters Microsoft uses for AI development are running …

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  • Singularity Containers for HPC & Deep Learning

    March 19, 2018 Nishanth Dandapanthula

    Containerization as a concept of isolating application processes while sharing the same operating system (OS) kernel has been around since the beginning of this century. It started its journey from as early as Jails from the FreeBSD era. Jails heavily leveraged the chroot environment but expanded capabilities to include a virtualized path to other system attributes such as storage, interconnects and users. Solaris Zones and AIX Workload Partitions also fall into a similar category.

    Since then, the advent and advancement in technologies such as cgroups, systemd and user-namespaces greatly improved the security and isolation of containers when compared to their …

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  • Programmable Networks Train Neural Nets Faster

    February 14, 2018

    When it comes to machine learning training, people tend to focus on the compute. We always want to know if the training is being done on specialized parallel X86 devices, like Intel’s Xeon Phi, or on massively parallel GPU devices, like Nvidia’s “Pascal” and “Volta” accelerators, or even on custom devices from the likes of Nervana Systems (now part of Intel), Wave Systems, Graphcore, Google, or Fujitsu.

    But as is the case with other kinds of high performance computing, the network matters when it comes to machine learning, and it can be the differentiating …

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  • Red Hat Shakes Up Container Ecosystem With CoreOS Deal

    January 30, 2018

    The container craze on Linux platforms just took an interesting twist now that Red Hat is shelling out $250 million to acquire its upstart rival in Linux and containers, CoreOS.

    As the largest and by far the most profitable open source software company in the world – it had $2.4 billion in sales in fiscal 2017, brought $253.7 million of that to the bottom line, and ended that fiscal year in February with a $2.7 billion subscription and services backlog – Red Hat has not been afraid to spend some money to get its hands on control of key open …

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  • Creating Chaos to Save the Datacenter

    December 12, 2017 Jeffrey Burt

    Downtime has been plaguing companies for decades, and the problems have only been exacerbated during the internet era and with the rise of ecommerce and the cloud.

    Systems crash, money is lost because no one is buying anything, more money is spent on the engineers and the time they need to fix the problem and get things back online. In the meantime, enterprises have to deal with frustrated customers and risk losing many of them, who lose trust the in the company and opt to move their business elsewhere. For much of that time, the response to system failures has …

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  • Burst Buffers Blow Through I/O Bottlenecks

    December 11, 2017

    Burst buffers are carving out a significant space for themselves in the HPC arena as a way to improve data checkpointing and application performance at a time when traditional storage technologies are struggling to keep up with the increasingly large and complex workloads including traditional simulation and modeling and new things like as data analytics.

    The fear has been that storage technologies such as parallel file systems could become the bottleneck that limits performance, and burst buffers have been designed to manage peak I/O situations so that organizations aren’t forced to scale their storage environments to be able to support …

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  • Keeping OpenStack On The Edge, Bleeding And Otherwise

    November 8, 2017

    Nobody likes to talk about the scope and scale of platforms more than we do at The Next Platform. Almost all of the interesting frameworks for various kinds of distributed computing are open source projects, but the lack of fit and finish is a common complaint across open source software projects.

    As Mark Collier, chief operating officer at the OpenStack Foundation, puts it succinctly: “Open source doesn’t have an innovation problem. It has an integration problem.”

    Collier’s chief concern, as well as that of his compatriot, Jonathan Bryce, executive director of the OpenStack Foundation and a former Racker ­– …

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  • Juniper Dons Red Hat To Ease Cloud Migration

    November 7, 2017

    Distributed telecommunications cloud environments offer service providers a way to more quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively deliver services to end users, but they come with their share of complexity, management headaches, integration challenges and coordinating operations among multiple cloud vendors.

    In a recent survey by Juniper Networks, service providers noted that a lack of visibility into all parts of the network cloud was the most difficult challenge facing as they migrate to the cloud, and that more than half of respondents said they use two or more cloud vendors in their distributed environments, adding to the complexity and the lack …

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