• Cray CTO On The Cambrian Compute Explosion

    June 19, 2017

    What goes around comes around. After fighting so hard to drive volume economics in the HPC arena with relatively inexpensive X86 clusters in the past twenty years, those economies of scale are running out of gas. That is why we are seeing an explosion in the diversity of compute, not just on the processor, but in adjunct computing elements that make a processor look smarter than it really is.

    The desire of system architects to try everything because it is fun has to be counterbalanced by a desire to make systems that can be manufactured at a price that is …

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  • First In-Depth Look at Google’s TPU Architecture

    April 5, 2017

    Four years ago, Google started to see the real potential for deploying neural networks to support a large number of new services. During that time it was also clear that, given the existing hardware, if people did voice searches for three minutes per day or dictated to their phone for short periods, Google would have to double the number of datacenters just to run machine learning models.

    The need for a new architectural approach was clear, Google distinguished hardware engineer, Norman Jouppi, tells The Next Platform, but it required some radical thinking. As it turns out, that’s exactly …

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  • Using Optane Memory Like A Hyperscaler

    March 28, 2017

    The ramp for Intel’s Optane 3D XPoint memory, which sits between DDR4 main memory and flash or disk storage, or beside main memory, in the storage hierarchy, is going to shake up the server market. And maybe not in the ways that Intel and its partner, Micron Technology, anticipate.

    Last week, Intel unveiled its first Optane 3D XPoint solid state cards and drives, which are now being previewed by selected hyperscalers and which will be rolling out in various capacities and form factors in the coming quarters. As we anticipated, and as Intel previewed last fall, the company is …

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  • Strong FBI Ties for Next Generation Quantum Computer

    March 13, 2017

    It is a good time to be the maker of a machine that excels in large-scale optimization problems for cybersecurity and defense. And it is even better to be the only maker of such a machine at a time when the need for a post-Moore’s Law system is in high demand.

    We have already described the U.S. Department of Energy’s drive to place a novel architecture at the heart of one of the future exascale supercomputers, and we have also explored the range of options that might fall under that novel processing umbrella. From neuromorphic chips, deep learning PIM-based architectures, …

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  • Many Life Sciences Workloads, One Single System

    February 2, 2017 David Gordon

    The trend at the high end, from supercomputer simulations to large-scale genomics studies, is to push heterogeneity and software complexity while reducing the overhead on the infrastructure side. This might sound like a case of dueling forces, but there is progress in creating a unified framework to run multiple workloads simultaneously on one robust cluster.

    To put this into context from a precision medicine angle, Dr. Michael McManus shared his insights about the years he spent designing infrastructure for life sciences companies and research. Those fields have changed dramatically in just the last five years alone in terms of data …

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  • Veteran IT Journalist, Jeffrey Burt, Joins The Next Platform as Senior Editor

    February 1, 2017 Nicole Hemsoth, Timothy Prickett Morgan

    We are thrilled to announce the full-time addition of veteran IT journalist, Jeffrey Burt to The Next Platform ranks.

    Jeffrey Burt has been a journalist for more than 30 years, with the last 16-plus year writing about the IT industry. During his long tenure with eWeek, he covered a broad range of subjects, from processors and IT infrastructure to collaboration, PCs, AI and autonomous vehicles.

    He’s written about FPGAs, supercomputers, hyperconverged infrastructure and SDN, cloud computing, deep learning and exascale computing. Regular readers here will recognize that his expertise in these areas fits in directly with our coverage …

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  • From Monolith to Microservices

    January 3, 2017 Ben Cotton

    Microservices are big in the tech world these days. The evolutionary heir to service-oriented architecture, microservice-based design is the ultimate manifestation of everything you learned about good application design.

    Loosely coupled with high cohesion, microservices are the application embodiment of DevOps principles. So why isn’t everything a microservice now? At the LISA Conference, Anders Wallgren and Avantika Mathur from Electric Cloud gave some insight with their talk “The Hard Truths about Microservices and Software Delivery”.

    Perhaps the biggest impediment to the adoption of microservices-based application architecture is an organizational culture that is not supportive. Microservices proponents recommend a team …

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  • Learning From Google’s Cloud Storage Evolution

    October 28, 2016

    Making storage cheaper on the cloud does not necessarily mean using tape or Blu-Ray discs to hold data. In a datacenter that has enormous bandwidth and consistent latency over a Clos network interconnecting hundreds of thousands of compute and storage servers, and by changing the durability and availability of data on the network and trading off storage costs and data access and movement costs, a hyperscaler can offer a mix of price and performance and cut costs.

    That, in a nutshell, is what search engine giant and public cloud provider Google is doing with the latest variant of persistent storage …

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  • Intel Hints At Future Skylake Xeons As Enterprises Cool

    October 24, 2016

    The gap in the appetite for new computing technology between enterprises and hyperscalers and cloud builders is widening, but no one is talking about causality quite yet even though there is probably some link between the rise of clouds and more conservative spending on the part of enterprises.

    But there is, perhaps, another cause. It could just be that the growth in traditional computing in the enterprise that is dedicated to things like print, file, web, email, and database serving is now less than the Moore’s Law increases that are enabled by process shrinks at the fabs run by Intel. …

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  • IEEE Reboots, Scans for Future Architectures

    October 13, 2016

    If there is any organization on the planet that has had a closer view of the coming demise of Moore’s Law, it is the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Since its inception in the 1960s, the wide range of industry professionals have been able to trace a steady trajectory for semiconductors, but given the limitations ahead, it is time to look to a new path—or several forks, to be more accurate.

    This realization about the state of computing for the next decade and beyond has spurred action from a subgroup, led by Georgia Tech professor Tom Conte and …

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