While GPUs are commonly used to accelerate massively parallel compute jobs that are behind simulations, media rendering, or machine learning algorithms, the next wave of growth could come from databases, thereby upsetting the balance of power in get another part of the datacenter infrastructure. …
HPC centers like to boast about the details of their supercomputing systems because they are political machines as much as they are tools for running simulations. …
Larry Ellison, co-founder and chief technology officer of database, middleware, and application software giant Oracle, caught the hardware bug pretty bad when he decided to buy Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion in early 2009. …
It would be far beyond the purview of The Next Platform to have deep insight to the complexity, scope, and scale of the Chinese economy. …
It takes a lot of engineering talent, time, and money to create custom interconnects that are the basis of scale-up servers, which is one of the reasons that so few companies have been able to sustain that investment over the years. …
We can talk about storage and networking as much as we want, and about how the gravity of data bends infrastructure to its needs, but the server – or a collection of them loosely or tightly coupled – is still the real center of the datacenter. …
While the Power8 processor has been available from IBM since April 2014, the chips were only rolled out in Big Blue’s biggest iron in October of that year and the company only ramped up its largest Power8 machines, the Power Systems E880, to their fully extended NUMA configurations last May. …
You have no doubt heard the one about making it up in volume, a jokey phrase that people use when a business has to crank out more and more widgets to stay in the same place. …
Whether it is IBM with the data-centric approach to next generation supercomputers or Intel with its scalable systems framework, there is little doubt that these and other major players in HPC are thinking differently about how to architect and benchmark systems in a way that balances floating point performance with the other equally important leg of the stool—data movement. …
If ARM processors are going to get traction in the datacenter, they will have to do so outside of the conservative glass houses of large enterprises. …
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