• Taking The Long View On High Performance Networking

    April 20, 2018

    It is hard to make a profit selling hardware to supercomputing centers, hyperscalers, and cloud builders, all of whom demand the highest performance at the lowest prices. But in the first quarter of this year, network chip, adapter, switch, and cable supplier Mellanox Technologies – which has products aimed at all three of these segments – managed to do it.

    And with activist investor, Starboard Value, pressing Mellanox to make the kinds of profits that other networking companies command, the swing to a very decent net income could not have come at a better time. Starboard has been on the …

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  • Talking Up the Expanding Markets for GPU Compute

    April 10, 2018

    There is a direct correlation between the length of time that Nvidia co-founder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang speaks during the opening keynote of each GPU Technology Conference and the total addressable market of accelerated computing based on GPUs.

    This stands to reason since the market for GPU compute is expanding. We won’t discuss which is the cause and which is the effect. Or maybe we will.

    It all started with offloading the parallel chunks of HPC applications from CPUs to GPUs in the early 2000s in academia, which were then first used in production HPC centers a decade …

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  • Open Compute Iron Is All About Acceleration

    April 6, 2018 Paul Teich

    The Open Compute Project (OCP) held its 9th annual US Summit recently, with 3,441 registered attendees this year. While that might seem small for a top-tier high tech event, there were also 80 exhibitors representing most of the cloud datacenter supply chain, plus a host of outstanding technical sessions. We are always on the hunt for new iron, and not surprisingly the most important gear we saw at OCP this year was related to compute acceleration.

    Here is how that new iron we saw breaks down across the major trends in acceleration.

    The first interesting thing we saw was a …

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  • The Buck Stops – And Starts – Here For GPU Compute

    April 3, 2018

    Ian Buck doesn’t just run the Tesla accelerated computing business at Nvidia, which is one of the company’s fastest-growing and most profitable products in its twenty five year history. The work that Buck and other researchers started at Stanford University in 2000 and then continued at Nvidia helped to transform a graphics card shader into a parallel compute engine that is helping to solve some of the world’s toughest simulation and machine learning problems.

    The annual GPU Technology Conference was held by Nvidia last week, and we sat down and had a chat with Buck about a bunch of things …

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  • OpenPower At The Inflection Point

    March 24, 2018

    When IBM launched the OpenPower initiative publicly five years ago, to many it seemed like a classic case of too little, too late. But hope springs eternal, particularly with a datacenter sector that is eagerly and actively seeking an alternative to the Xeon processor to curtail the hegemony that Intel has in the glass house.

    Perhaps the third time will be the charm. Back in 1991, Apple and IBM and Motorola teamed up to create the AIM Alliance, which sought to create a single unified computing architecture that was suitable for embedded and desktop applications, replacing the Motorola 68000 processors …

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  • FPGA Interconnect Boosted In Concert With Compute

    March 12, 2018

    To keep their niche in computing, field programmable gate arrays not only need to stay on the cutting edge of chip manufacturing processes. They also have to include the most advanced networking to balance out that compute, rivalling that which the makers of switch ASICs provide in their chips.

    By comparison, CPUs have it easy. They don’t have the serializer/deserializer (SerDes) circuits that switch chips have as the foundation of their switch fabric. Rather, they might have a couple of integrated Ethernet network interface controllers embedded on the die, maybe running at 1 Gb/sec or 10 Gb/sec, and they offload …

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  • Drilling Down Into Ethernet Switch Trends

    March 9, 2018

    Of the three pillars of the datacenter – compute, storage, and networking – the one that consistently still has some margins and yet does not dominate the overall system budget is networking. While these elements affect each other, they are still largely standalone realms, with their own specialized devices and suppliers. And so it is important to know the trends in the technologies.

    Until fairly recently, the box counters like IDC and Gartner have been pretty secretive about the data they have about the networking business. But IDC has been gradually giving a little more flavor than just saying Cisco …

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  • Weaving A Streaming Stack Like Twitter And Yahoo

    March 6, 2018

    The hyperscalers of the world have to deal with dataset sizes – both streaming and at rest – and real-time processing requirements that put them into an entirely different class of computing.

    They are constantly inventing and reinventing what they do in compute, storage, and networking not just because they enjoy the intellectual challenge, but because they have swelling customer bases that hammer on their systems so hard they can break them.

    This is one of the reasons why an upstart called Streamlio has created a new event-driven platform that is based the work of software engineers at Twitter, Yahoo, …

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  • The Server Market Booms, And It Could Last For A While

    March 1, 2018

    The general consensus, for as long as anyone can remember, is that there is an insatiable appetite for compute in the datacenter. Were it not for the constraints of budgets, for both the acquisition of iron, the facilities to house it, the electricity to power and cool it, and the people to manage it, it is safe to say that the installed base of servers worldwide would be much larger than it is.

    But the world doesn’t work that way, and there are constraints. But thanks to ever more complex applications, ever richer media, and a burning desire to save …

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  • The Road To 400G Ethernet Is Paved With Bechtolsheim’s Intentions

    February 21, 2018

    The best way to make a wave is to make a big splash, which is something that Andy Bechtolsheim, perhaps the most famous serial entrepreneur in IT infrastructure, is very good at doing. As one of the co-founders of Sun Microsystems and a slew of networking and system startups as well as the first investor in Google, he doesn’t just see waves, but generates them and then surfs on them, creating companies and markets as he goes along.

    Bechtolsheim was a PhD student at Stanford University, working on a project that aimed to integrate networking interfaces with processors when he …

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