• Hitachi Pulls Itself Together In The Datacenter

    May 10, 2018

    Hitachi is a massive multi-national conglomerate that has more than 300,000 employees and 950 subsidiaries and a reach that extends into a wide array of industries, from aircraft and automotive systems to telecommunications, construction, defense and financial services. It also is among the world’s largest IT companies, nestled in there among the likes of Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Samsung. Hitachi’s sprawling technology capabilities ranges from compute and storage appliances in its well-known Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) unit to datacenter management software, data management and business intelligence, and the Internet of Things.

    For the past several years, the company …

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  • Successful Machine Learning With A Global Data Fabric

    May 7, 2018 Jack Norris

    One of the most common misconceptions about machine learning is that success is solely due to its dynamic algorithms. In reality, the learning potential of those algorithms and their models are driven by the data preparation, staging and delivery. When suitably fed, machine learning algorithms work wonders. Their success, however, is ultimately rooted in the data logistics.

    Data logistics are integral to how sufficient training data is accessed. They determine how easily new models are deployed. They specify how changes in data content can be isolated to compare models. And, they facilitate how multiple models are effectively used as part …

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  • Fabrics Open The Way For Storage Class Memory

    May 7, 2018

    Dell EMC has long been a vocal proponent of NVM-Express, the up and coming protocol that cuts out the CPU jib-jab with PCI-Express peripherals and that boost throughput and drops latency for flash and other non-volatile memory.

    For the past two years, Dell, like other system makers, has put NVM-Express drives in its servers while ramping up the flash in its high-end storage systems and preparing to bring the protocol to those external storage appliances. It has taken time to get the arrays reworked, for the price of NVM-Express drives to come down, and for the volumes to ramp up. …

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  • Intel Teaches Quantum Computing 101

    May 3, 2018 Rob Farber

    A team at Intel, in collaboration with QuTech in the Netherlands, is researching the possibilities of quantum computing to better understand how practical quantum computers can be programmed to impact our lives. Given the research nature and current limitations of quantum computers, particularly in terms of I/O, researchers are focusing on specific types of algorithms.

    As you might expect, Intel Labs is focused on applications such as material science and quantum chemistry. Other possible algorithms include parameterized simulations and various combinatorial optimization problems that have a global optimum. It is also worth noting that this research may never come to …

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  • Capitalizing On Hybrid Cloud In HPC

    May 2, 2018 Gary Tyreman

    Cloud computing became an essential infrastructure strategy for nearly every business. Last year Gartner predicted that demand for infrastructure as a service would increase by 36.8 percent. A 2018 McAfee survey found that 97 percent of organizations are using cloud services from public, private or both. Similarly, Rightscale’s 2018 cloud survey showed that 95 percent of enteprises have a cloud strategy, including 51 percent with a hybrid cloud strategy.

    Yet, despite the cloud’s ubiquity, and the fact that HPC in the cloud has been possible for more than a decade – Univa commissioned the very first HPC cluster in AWS …

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  • Sluggish Moore’s Law Doesn’t Impede Intel One Bit

    April 27, 2018

    The demand for compute is so strong among the hyperscalers and cloud builders that nothing seems to be slowing down Intel’s datacenter business. Not delays in processor rollouts due to the difficulties in ramping 14 nanometer and 10 nanometer processes as the pace of Moore’s Law increases in transistor density and the lowering of the cost of chips slows. Not what is a pretty substantial price increase that accompanies the core scale out and feature expansion in the “Skylake” Xeon SP processors. Not the credible competition from IBM, AMD, Cavium, and Qualcomm.

    The sun is shining on the datacenter, and …

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  • Nvidia Memory Switch Welds Together Massive Virtual GPU

    March 27, 2018

    It has happened time and time again in computing in the past three decades in the datacenter: A device scales up its capacity – be it compute, storage, or networking – as high as it can go, and then it has to go parallel and scale out.

    The NVLink interconnect that Nvidia created to lash together its “Pascal” and “Volta” GPU accelerators into a kind of giant virtual GPU were the first phase of this scale out for Tesla compute. But with only six NVLink ports on a Volta SXM2 device, there is a limit to how many Teslas can …

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  • In Modern Datacenters, The Latency Tail Wags The Network Dog

    March 27, 2018 Kevin Deierling

    The expression, the tail wags the dog, is used when a seemingly unimportant factor or infrequent event actually dominates the situation. It turns out that in modern datacenters, this is precisely the case – with relatively rare events determining overall performance.

    As the world continues to undergo a digital transformation, one of the most pressing challenges faced by cloud and web service providers is building hyperscale datacenters to handle the growing pace of interactive and real-time requests, generated by the enormous growth of users and mobile apps. With the increasing scale and demand for services, IT organizations have turned …

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  • Google And Its Hyperscale Peers Add Power To The Server Fleet

    March 26, 2018

    Six years ago, when Google decided to get involved with the OpenPower consortium being put together by IBM as its third attempt to bolster the use of Power processors in the datacenter, the online services giant had three applications that had over 1 billion users: Gmail, YouTube, and the eponymous search engine that has become the verb for search.

    Now, after years of working with Rackspace Hosting on a Power9 server design, Google is putting systems based on IBM’s Power9 processor into production, and not just because it wants pricing leverage with Intel and other chip suppliers. Google now has …

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  • Why Cisco Should – And Should Not – Acquire Pure Storage

    March 12, 2018

    Flash memory has become absolutely normal in the datacenter, but that does not mean it is ubiquitous and it most certainly does not mean that all flash arrays, whether homegrown and embedded in servers or purchased as appliances, are created equal. They are not, and you can tell not only from the feeds and speeds, but from the dollars and sense.

    It has been nine years since Pure Storage, one of the original flash array upstarts, was founded and seven years since the company dropped out of stealth with its first generation of FlashArray products. In that relatively short time, …

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