• Thinking Through The Cognitive HPC Nexus With Big Blue

    June 21, 2017

    There are plenty of things that the members of the high performance community do not agree on, there is a growing consensus that machine learning applications will at least in some way be part of the workflow at HPC centers that do traditional simulation and modeling.

    Some HPC vendors think the HPC and AI systems have either already converged or will soon do so, and others think that the performance demands (both in terms of scale and in time to result) on both HPC and AI will necessitate radically different architectures and therefore distinct systems for these two workloads. IBM, …

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  • Competition Returns To X86 Servers In Epyc Fashion

    June 20, 2017

    AMD has been absent from the X86 server market for so long that many of us have gotten into the habit of only speaking about the Xeon server space and how it relates to the relatively modest (in terms of market share, not in terms of architecture and capability) competition that Intel has faced in the past eight years.

    Those days are over now that AMD has successfully got its first X86 server chip out the door with the launch of the “Naples” chip, the first in a line of processors that will carry the Epyc brand and, if all …

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  • The Composable Systems Wave Is Rising

    June 8, 2017

    Hardware is, by its very nature, physical and therefore, unlike software or virtual hardware and software routines encoded by FPGAs, it is the one thing that cannot be easily changed. The dream of composable systems, which we have discussed in the past, is something that has been swirling around in the heads of system architects for more than a decade, and we are without question getting closer to realizing the dream of making the components of systems and the clusters that are created from them programmable like software.

    The hyperscalers, of course, have been on the bleeding edge of …

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  • One Hyperscaler Gets The Jump On Skylake, Everyone Else Sidelined

    June 7, 2017

    Well, it could have been a lot worse. About 5.6 percent worse, if you do the math.

    As we here at The Next Platform have been anticipating for quite some time, with so many stars aligning here in 2017 and a slew of server processor and GPU coprocessor announcements and deliveries expected starting in the summer and rolling into the fall, there is indeed a slowdown in the server market and one that savvy customers might be able to take advantage of. But we thought those on the bleeding edge of performance were going to wait to see what Intel, …

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  • When No One Can Make Money In Systems

    June 6, 2017

    Making money in the information technology market has always been a challenge, but it keeps getting increasingly difficult as the tumultuous change in how companies consume compute, storage, and networking rips through all aspects of this $3 trillion market.

    It is tough to know exactly what do to, and we see companies chasing the hot new things, doing acquisitions to bolster their positions, and selling off legacy businesses to generate the cash to do the deals and to keep Wall Street at bay. Companies like IBM, Dell, HPE, and Lenovo have sold things off and bought other things to try …

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  • Under The Hood Of Google’s TPU2 Machine Learning Clusters

    May 22, 2017 Paul Teich

    As we previously reported, Google unveiled its second-generation TensorFlow Processing Unit (TPU2) at Google I/O last week. Google calls this new generation “Google Cloud TPUs”, but provided very little information about the TPU2 chip and the systems that use it other than to provide a few colorful photos. Pictures do say more than words, so in this article we will dig into the photos and provide our thoughts based the pictures and on the few bits of detail Google did provide.

    To start with, it is unlikely that Google will sell TPU-based chips, boards, or servers – TPU2 …

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  • Big Bang For The Buck Jump With Volta DGX-1

    May 19, 2017

    One of the reasons why Nvidia has been able to quadruple revenues for its Tesla accelerators in recent quarters is that it doesn’t just sell raw accelerators as well as PCI-Express cards, but has become a system vendor in its own right through its DGX-1 server line. The company has also engineered new adapter cards specifically aimed at hyperscalers who want to crank up the performance on their machine learning inference workloads with a cheaper and cooler Volts GPU.

    Nvidia does not break out revenues for the DGX-1 line separately from other Tesla and GRID accelerator product sales, but we …

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  • AMD Disrupts The Two-Socket Server Status Quo

    May 17, 2017

    It is funny to think that Advanced Micro Devices has been around almost as long as the IBM System/360 mainframe and that it has been around since the United States landed people on the moon. The company has gone through many gut-wrenching transformations, adapting to changing markets. Like IBM and Apple, just to name two, AMD has had its share of disappointments and near-death experiences, but unlike Sun Microsystems, Silicon Graphics, Sequent Computer, Data General, Tandem Computer, and Digital Equipment, it has managed to stay independent and live to fight another day.

    AMD wants a second chance in the datacenter, …

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  • First In-Depth Look at Google’s New Second-Generation TPU

    May 17, 2017

    It was only just last month that we spoke with Google distinguished hardware engineer, Norman Jouppi, in depth about the tensor processing unit used internally at the search giant to accelerate deep learning inference, but that device—that first TPU—is already appearing rather out of fashion.

    This morning at the Google’s I/O event, the company stole Nvidia’s recent Volta GPU thunder by releasing details about its second-generation tensor processing unit (TPU), which will manage both training and inference in a rather staggering 180 teraflops system board, complete with custom network to lash several together into “TPU pods” that can deliver Top …

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  • The Embiggening Bite That GPUs Take Out Of Datacenter Compute

    May 16, 2017

    We are still chewing through all of the announcements and talk at the GPU Technology Conference that Nvidia hosted in its San Jose stomping grounds last week, and as such we are thinking about the much bigger role that graphics processors are playing in datacenter compute – a realm that has seen five decades of dominance by central processors of one form or another.

    That is how CPUs got their name, after all. And perhaps this is a good time to remind everyone that systems used to be a collection of different kinds of compute, and that is why the …

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